and to see it, a whole mass of prejudices must be swept aside--some
artificial, the products of speculative philosophy, and others the
natural product of common-sense. We tend to regard immobility as a more
simple affair than movement. But what we call immobility is really
composite and is merely relative, being a relation between movements.
If, for example, there are two trains running in the same direction on
parallel lines at exactly the same speed, opposite one another, then the
passengers in each train, when observing the other train, will regard
the trains as motionless. So, generally, immobility is only apparent,
Change is real. We tend to be misled by language; we speak, for
instance, of 'the state of things'; but what we call a state is the
appearance which a change assumes in the eyes of a being who, himself,
changes according to an identical or analogous rhythm. "Take, for
example," says Bergson, "a summer day. We are stretched on the grass, we
look around us--everything is at rest--there is absolute immobility--no
change. But the grass is growing, the leaves of the trees are developing
or decaying--we ourselves are growing older all the time. That which
seems rest, simplicity itself, is but a composite of our ageing with the
changes which takes place in the grass, in the leaves, in all that is
around us. Change, then, is simple, while 'the state of things' as we
call it, is composite. Every stable state is the result of the co-
existence between that change and the change of the person who perceives
it."[Footnote: La Nature de l'Ame, lecture 2.]

It is an axiom in the philosophy of Bergson that all change or movement
is indivisible. He asserts this expressly in Matter and
Memory,[Footnote: Matter and Memory, p. 246 ff. (Fr. p. 207 ff).] and
again in the second lecture on The Perception of Change he deals with
the indivisibility of movement somewhat fully, submitting it to a
careful analysis, from which the following quotation is an extract--"My