312 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



Nothing would be easier, now, than to extend Zeno's 

 argument to qualitative becoming and to evolutionary 

 becoming. We should find the same contradictions 

 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 reconsti- 

 tute what is being made? How, for instance, from child- 

 hood once posited as a thing, shall we pass to adolescence, 

 when, by the hypothesis, 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 — dead- 

 locks 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 "The child becomes a man," let us take care not to 

 fathom too deeply the literal meaning of the expression, 

 or we shall find that, when we posit the subject "child," 

 the attribute "man" does not yet apply to it, and that, 



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. 4 



