of being a pulsing reality. I no longer know whether I see scents, breathe
sounds, or smell colours. Do I love? Do I think? The question has no
longer a meaning for me. I am, in my complete self, each of my attitudes,
each of my changes. It is not my sight which is indistinct or my attention
which is idle. It is I who have resumed contact with pure reality, whose
essential movement admits no form of number. He who thus makes the really
"deep" and "inner" effort necessary to becoming--were it only for an
elusive moment--discovers, under the simplest appearance, inexhaustible
sources of unsuspected wealth; the rhythm of his duration becomes amplified
and refined; his acts become more conscious; and in what seemed to him at
first sudden severance or instantaneous pulsation he discovers complex
transitions imperceptibly shaded off, musical transitions full of
unexpected repetitions and threaded movements.

Thus, the deeper we go in consciousness, the less suitable become these
schemes of separation and fixity existing in spatial and numerical forms.
The inner world is that of pure quality. There is no measurable
homogeneity, no collection of atomically constructed elements. The
phenomena distinguished in it by analysis are not composing units, but
phases. And it is only when they reach the surface, when they come in
contact with the external world, when they are incarnated in language or
gesture, that the categories of matter become adapted to them. In its true
nature, reality appears as an uninterrupted flow, an impalpable shiver of
fluid changing tones, a perpetual flux of waves which ebb and break and
dissolve into one another without shock or jar. Everything is ceaseless
change; and the state which appears the most stable is already change,
since it continues and grows old. Constant quantities are represented only
by the materialisation of habit or by means of practical symbols. And it
is on this point that Mr Bergson rightly insists. ("Creative Evolution",
page 3.)