iv FORM AND BECOMING 329 



Nothing would be easier, now, than to extend 

 Zeno s argument to qualitative becoming and to 

 evolutionary becoming. We should find the same con 

 tradictions in these. That the child can become a youth, 

 ripen to maturity and decline to old age, we understand 

 when we consider that vital evolution is here the reality 

 itself. Infancy, adolescence, maturity, old age, are mere 

 views of the mind, possible stops imagined by us, from 

 without, along the continuity of a progress. On the 

 contrary, let childhood, adolescence, maturity and old 

 age be given as integral parts of the evolution, they 

 become real stops, and we can no longer conceive how 

 evolution is possible, for rests placed beside rests will 

 never be equivalent to a movement. How, with what 

 is made, can we reconstitute what is being made ? 

 How, for instance, from childhood once posited as a 

 thing, shall we pass to adolescence, when, by the hypo 

 thesis, childhood only is given ? If we look at it 

 closely, we shall see that our habitual manner of 

 speaking, which is fashioned after our habitual manner 

 of thinking, leads us to actual logical deadlocks, 

 deadlocks to which we allow ourselves to be led without 

 anxiety, because we feel confusedly that we can always 

 get out of them if we like : all that we have to do, in 

 fact, is to give up the cinematographical habits of our 

 intellect. When we say &quot; The child becomes a man,&quot; 

 let us take care not to fathom too deeply the literal 



we regard as conclusive (see Evellin, Inf.ni et quantity Paris, 1880, pp. 

 63-97 ; cf. Revue philosophique, vol. xi., 1881, pp. 564-568). The truth is 

 that mathematics, as we have tried to show in a former work, deals 

 and can deal only with lengths. It has therefore had to seek devices, 

 first, to transfer to the movement, which is not a length, the divisibility 

 of the line passed over, and then to reconcile with experience the idea 

 (contrary to experience and full of absurdities) of a movement that is a 

 length, that is, of a movement placed upon its trajectory and arbitrarily 

 decomposable like it. 



