postulate, to begin with, that the motionless is real, then we shall be
incapable of grasping reality. The philosophies of Plato, of Aristotle,
and of Plotinus were developed from the thesis that there is more in the
immutable than in the moving, and that it is by way of diminution that
we pass from the stable to the unstable.

The main reason why it is such a difficult matter for us to grasp the
reality of continuous change is owing to the limitations of our
intellectual nature. "We are made in order to act, as much as and more
than in order to think--or, rather, when we follow the bent of our
nature, it is in order to act that we think."[Footnote: Creative
Evolution, p. 313 (Fr. p. 321).] Intellect is always trying to carve out
for itself stable forms because it is primarily fitted for action, and
"is characterized by a natural inability to comprehend life" and grasp
Change.[Footnote: Creative Evolution, p. 174 (Fr. p. 179).] Our
intellect loves the solid and the static, but life itself is not static-
-it is dynamic. We might say that the intellect takes views across the
ever-moving scene, snapshots of reality. It acts like the camera of the
cinematograph operator, which is capable only of producing photographs,
successive and static, in a series upon a ribbon. To grasp reality, we
have to do what the cinematograph does with the film--that is, introduce
or rather, re-introduce movement.[Footnote: Creative Evolution, pp. 320-
324 (Fr. pp. 328-332).] The stiff photograph is an abstraction bereft of
movement, so, too, our intellectual views of the world and of our own
nature are static instead of being dynamic. Human life is not made up of
childhood, adolescence, manhood, and old age as "states," although we
tend to speak of it in this way. Life is not a thing, nor the state of a
thing--it is a continuous movement or change. The soul itself is a
movement, not an entity. In the physical world, light, when examined,
proves itself to be a movement. Even physical science, bound, as it