CHAPTER IV 



THE CINEMATOGRAPHICAL MECHANISM OF THOUGHT AND 



THE MECHANISTIC ILLUSION A GLANCE AT THE 



HISTORY OF SYSTEMS l REAL BECOMING AND FALSE 



EVOLUTIONISM 



IT remains for us to examine in themselves two 

 theoretical illusions which we have frequently met with 

 before, but whose consequences rather than principle 

 have hitherto concerned us. Such is the object of 

 the present chapter. It will afford us the opportunity 

 of removing certain objections, of clearing up certain 

 misunderstandings, and, above all, of defining more 

 precisely, by contrasting it with others, a philosophy 

 which sees in duration the very stuff of reality. 



Matter or mind, reality has appeared to us as a 

 perpetual becoming. It makes itself or it unmakes 

 itself, but it is never something made. Such is 

 the intuition that we have of mind when we draw 

 aside the veil which is interposed between our con 

 sciousness and ourselves. This, also, is what our 



1 The part of this chapter which treats of the history of systems, par 

 ticularly of the Greek philosophy, is only the very succinct r^sum of 

 views that we developed at length, from 1900 to 1904, in our lectures 

 at the College de France, especially in a course on the History of the Idea cf 

 Time (1902-1903). We then compared the mechanism of conceptual 

 thought to that of the cinematograph. We believe the comparison wil] 

 be useful here. 



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