302 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



to be led by them; he who grasps them as a whole will 

 dominate them. In short, the qualities of matter are so 

 many stable views that we take of its instability. 



Now, in the continuity of sensible qualities we mark 

 off the boundaries of bodies. Each of these bodies really 

 changes at every moment. In the first place, it resolves 

 itself into a group of qualities, and every quality, as we said, 

 consists of a succession of elementary movements. But, 

 even if we regard the quality as a stable state, the body 

 is still unstable in that it changes qualities without ceasing. 

 The body pre-eminently — that which we are most justified 

 in isolating within the continuity of matter, because it 

 constitutes a relatively closed system — is the living body; 

 it is, moreover, for it that we cut out the others within 

 the whole. Now, life is an evolution. We concentrate 

 a period of this evolution in a stable view which we 

 call a form, and, when the change has become considerable 

 enough to overcome the fortunate inertia of our per- 

 ception, we say that the body has changed its form. But 

 in reality the body is changing form at every moment; 

 or rather, there is no form, since form is immobile and the 

 reality is movement. What is real is the continual change 

 of form : form is only a snapshot view of a transition. There- 

 fore, here again, our perception manages to solidify into 

 discontinuous images the fluid continuity of the real. 

 When the successive images do not differ from each other 

 too much, we consider them all as the waxing and waning 

 of a single mean image, or as the deformation of this image 

 in different directions. And to this mean we really allude 

 when we speak of the essence of a thing, or of the thing 

 itself. 



Finally things, once constituted, show on the surface, 

 by their changes of situation, the profound changes that 

 are being accomplished within the Whole. We say then 



