350 CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



For this, indeed, signs far more precise than those 

 of language are required. 



We may say, then, that our physics differs from 

 that of the ancients chiefly in the indefinite breaking up 

 of time. For the ancients, time comprises as many 

 undivided periods as our natural perception and our 

 language cut out in it successive facts, each presenting 

 a kind of individuality. For that reason, each of 

 these facts admits, in their view, of only a total 

 definition or description. If, in describing it, we are 

 led to distinguish phases in it, we have several facts 

 instead of a single one, several undivided periods 

 instead of a single period ; but time is always supposed 

 to be divided into determinate periods, and the mode 

 of division to be forced on the mind by apparent 

 crises of the real, comparable to that of puberty, by 

 the apparent release of a new form. For a Kepler or 

 a Galileo, on the contrary, time is not divided objec 

 tively in one way or another by the matter that fills it. 

 It has no natural articulations. We can, we ought to, 

 divide it as we please. All moments count. None 

 of them has the right to set itself up as a moment 

 that represents or dominates the others. And, conse 

 quently, we know a change only when we are able 

 to determine what it is about at any one of its 

 moments. 



The difference is profound. In fact, in a certain 

 aspect it is radical. But, from the point of view from 

 which we are regarding j^jt is a difference of degree 

 rather than of kind. The human mind has passec 

 from the first kind of knowledge to the second througl 

 gradual perfecting, simply by seeking a higher precision 

 There is the same relation between these two sciences 



as between the noting of the phases of a movement by 



