138 SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY 



tion ? Whatever it is, it is not the successive occupation 

 of successive positions : something beyond the mathe- 

 matical theory of motion is required to account for it. 

 Opponents of the mathematical theory emphasise this fact. 

 " Your theory," they say, " may be very logical, and 

 might apply admirably to some other world ; but in this 

 actual world, actual motions are quite different from what 

 your theory would declare them to be, and require, there- 

 fore, some different philosophy from yours for their 

 adequate explanation." 



The objection thus raised is one which I have no wish 

 to underrate, but 1 believe it can be fully answered with- 

 out departing from the methods and the outlook which 

 have led to the mathematical theory of motion. Let us, 

 however, first try to state the objection more fully. 



If the mathematical theory is adequate, nothing happens 

 when a body moves except that it is in different places 

 at different times. But in this sense the hour-hand 

 and the second-hand are equally in motion, yet in the 

 second-hand there is something perceptible to our senses 

 which is absent in the hour-hand. We can see, at each 

 moment, that the second-hand is moving^ which is different 

 from seeing it first in one place and then in another. 

 This seems to involve our seeing it simultaneously in a 

 number of places, although it must also involve our 

 seeing that it is in some of these places earlier than in 

 others. If, for example, I move my hand quickly from 

 left to right, you seem to see the whole movement at 

 once, in spite of the fact that you know it begins at the 

 left and ends at the right. It is this kind of considera- 

 tion, I think, which leads Bergson and many others to 

 regard a movement as really one indivisible whole, not 

 the series of separate states imagined by the mathe- 

 matician. 



