action: it is a skein of motionless and numerable habits, side by side,
and of distinct and solid things, with sharp outlines and mechanical
relations. And it is for the representation of the phenomena which occur
within this dead rind that space and number are valid.

For we have to live, I mean live our common daily life, with our body, with
our customary mechanism rather than with our true depths. Our attention is
therefore most often directed by a natural inclination to the practical
worth and useful function of our internal states, to the public object of
which they are the sign, to the effect they produce externally, to the
gestures by which we express them in space. A social average of individual
modalities interests us more than the incommunicable originality of our
deeper life. The words of language besides offer us so many symbolic
centres round which crystallise groups of motor mechanisms set up by habit,
the only usual elements of our internal determinations. Now, contact with
society has rendered these motor mechanisms practically identical in all
men. Hence, whether it be a question of sensation, feeling, or ideas, we
have these neutral dry and colourless residua, which spread lifeless over
the surface of ourselves, "like dead leaves on the water of a pond."
("Essay on the Immediate Data," page 102.)

Thus the progress we have lived falls into the rank of a thing that can be
handled. Space and number lay hold of it. And soon all that remains of
what was movement and life is combinations formed and annulled, and forces
mechanically composed in a whole of juxtaposed atoms, and to represent this
whole a collection of petrified concepts, manipulated in dialectic like
counters.

Quite different appears the true inner reality, and quite different are its
profound characteristics. To begin with, it contains nothing quantitative;