moving object has left, which it will take up, which it might assume if
it were to stop in its course. We have need of immobility, and the more
we succeed in presenting to ourselves the movement as coinciding with
the space which it traverses, the better we think we understand it.
Really, there is no true immobility, if we imply by that, an absence of
movement."[Footnote: Translated from La Perception du Changement, pp.
19-20.] This immobility of which we have need for the purposes of action
and of practical life, we erect into an absolute reality. It is of
course convenient to our sense of sight to lay hold of objects in this
way; as pioneer of the sense of touch, it prepares our action on the
external world. But, although for all practical purposes we require the
notion of immobility as part of our mental equipment, it does not at all
help us to grasp reality. Then we habitually regard movement as
something superadded to the motionless. This is quite legitimate in the
world of affairs; but when we bring this habit into the world of
speculation, we misconceive reality, we create lightheartedly insoluble
problems, and close our eyes to what is most alive in the real world.
For us movement is one position, then another position, and so on
indefinitely. It is true that we say there must be something else, viz.,
the actual passing across the interval which separates those positions.
But such a conception of Change is quite false. All true change or
movement is indivisible. We, by constructing fictitious states and
trying to compose movement out of them, endeavour to make a process
coincide with a thing--a movement with an immobility. This is the way to
arrive at dilemmas, antinomies, and blind-alleys of thought. The puzzles
of Zeno about "Achilles and the Tortoise" and "The Moving Arrow" are
classical examples of the error involved in treating movement as
divisible.[Footnote: Bergson in Matter and Memory examines Zeno's four
puzzles: "The Dichotomy," "Achilles and the Tortoise," "The Arrow" and
"The Stadium."] If movement is not everything, it is nothing, and if we