iv FORM AND BECOMING 317 



organism thus evidences, in a visible and tangible 

 form, the perfect accord of perception and action. 

 So if our activity always aims at a result into which 

 it is momentarily fitted, our perception must retain 

 of the material world, at every moment, only a state 

 in which it is provisionally placed. This is the most 

 natural hypothesis. And it is easy to see that ex 

 perience confirms it. 



From our first glance at the world, before we even 

 make out bodies in it, we distinguish qualities. Colour 

 succeeds to colour, sound to sound, resistance to resist 

 ance, etc. Each of these qualities, taken separately, is a 

 state that seems to persist as such, immovable until 

 another replaces it. Yet each of these qualities resolves 

 itself, on analysis, into an enormous number of ele 

 mentary movements. Whether we see in it vibrations 

 or whether we represent it in any other way, one fact 

 is certain, it is that every quality is change. In vain, 

 moreover, shall we seek beneath the change the thing 

 which changes : it is always provisionally, and in order 

 to satisfy our imagination, that we attach the movement 

 to a mobile. The mobile flies for ever before the pursuit 

 of science, which is concerned with mobility alone. 

 In the smallest discernible fraction of a second, in the 

 almost instantaneous perception of a sensible quality, 

 there may be trillions of oscillations which repeat 

 themselves. The permanence of a sensible quality 

 consists in this repetition of movements, as the per 

 sistence of life consists in a series of palpitations. The 

 primal function of perception is precisely to grasp a series 

 of elementary changes under the form of a quality or 

 of a simple state, by a work of condensation. The 

 greater the power of acting bestowed upon an animal 

 species, the more numerous, probably, are the ele- 



