it.] FORM AND BECOMING 309 



passes there and might stop there. It is true that if it 

 did stop there, it would be at rest there, and at this point 

 it is no longer movement that we should have to do with. 

 The truth is that if the arrow leaves the point A to fall 

 down at the point B, its movement AB is as simple, as 

 indecomposable, in so far as it is movement, as the tension 

 of the bow that shoots it. As the shrapnel, bursting before 

 it falls to the ground, covers the explosive zone with an 

 indivisible danger, so the arrow which goes from A to B 

 displays with a single stroke, although over a certain extent 

 of duration, its indivisible mobility. Suppose an elastic 

 stretched from A to B, could you divide its extension? 

 The course of the arrow is this very extension; it is equally 

 simple and equally undivided. It is a single and unique 

 bound. You fix a point C in the interval passed, and say 

 that at a certain moment the arrow was in C. If it had 

 been there, it would have been stopped there, and you 

 would no longer have had a flight from A to B, but two 

 flights, one from A to C and the other from C to B, with an 

 interval of rest. A single movement is entirely, by the 

 hypothesis, a movement between two stops; if there are 

 intermediate stops, it is no longer a single movement. 

 At bottom, the illusion arises from this, that the movement, 

 once effected, has laid along its course a motionless tra- 

 jectory on which we can count as many immobilities as 

 we will. From this we conclude that the movement, 

 whilst being effected, lays at each instant beneath it a position 

 with which it coincides. We do not see that the trajectory 

 is created in one stroke, although a certain time is re- 

 quired for it; and that though we can divide at will the 

 trajectory once created, we cannot divide its creation, 

 which is an act in progress and not a thing. To suppose 

 that the moving body is at a point of its course is to cut 

 the course in two by a snip of the scissors at this point, 



