motion are indivisible, that they are acts; so that to solve the
riddle about Achilles and the tortoise we need no mathematics of the
infinitesimal, but only to ask Achilles how he accomplishes the feat.
Achilles would reply that in so many strides he would do it; and we
may be surprised to learn that these strides are indivisible, so that,
apparently, Achilles could not have stumbled in the middle of one, and
taken only half of it. Of course, in nature, in what non-Bergsonians
call reality, he could: but not in his immediate feeling, for if he
had stumbled, the real stride, that which he was aware of taking,
would have been complete at the stumbling-point. It is certain that
consciousness comes in stretches, in breaths: all its data are
æsthetic wholes, like visions or snatches of melody; and we should
never be aware of anything were we not aware of something all at once.

When a man has taught himself--and it is a difficult art--to revert in
this way to rudimentary consciousness and to watch himself live, he
will be able, if he likes, to add a plausible chapter to speculative
psychology. He has unearthed in himself the animal sensibility which
has thickened, budded, and crystallised into his present somewhat
intellectual image of the world. He has touched again the vegetative
stupor, the multiple disconnected landscapes, the "blooming buzzing
confusion" which his reason has partly set in order. May he not have
in all this a key to the consciousness of other creatures? Animal
psychology, and sympathy with the general life of nature, are vitiated
both for naturalists and for poets by the human terms they must use,
terms which presuppose distinctions which non-human beings probably
have not made. These distinctions correct the illusions of immediate
appearance in ways which only a long and special experience has
imposed upon us, and they should not be imported into other souls. We
are old men trying to sing the loves of children; we are wingless