iv.i FORM AND BECOMING 301 



other replaces it. Yet each of these qualities resolves 

 itself, on analysis, into an enormous number of elementary 

 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 move- 

 ments, as the persistence of life consists in a series of pal- 

 pitations. 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 elementary 

 changes that its faculty of perceiving concentrates into 

 one of its instants. And the progress must be continuous, 

 in nature, from the beings that vibrate almost in unison 

 with the oscillations of the ether, up to those that embrace 

 trillions of these oscillations in the shortest of their simple 

 perceptions. The first feel hardly anything but move- 

 ments; the others perceive quality. The first are almost 

 caught up in the running-gear of things; the others react, 

 and the tension of their faculty of acting is probably pro- 

 portional to the concentration of their faculty of per- 

 ceiving. The progress goes on even in humanity itself. 

 A man is so much the more a "man of action" as he can 

 embrace in a glance a greater number of events: he who 

 perceives successive events one by one will allow himself 



