iv.] FORM AND BECOMING 313 



when we express the attribute "man," it applies no more 

 to the subject " child." The reality, which is the transition 

 from childhood to manhood, has slipped between our 

 ringers. We have only the imaginary stops "child" and 

 "man," and we are very near to saying that one of these 

 stops is the other, just as the arrow of Zeno is, according 

 to that philosopher, at all the points of the course. The 

 truth is that if language here were molded on reality, we 

 should not say "The child becomes the man," but "There 

 is becoming from the child to the man." In the first 

 proposition, "becomes" is a verb of indeterminate meaning, 

 intended to mask the absurdity into which we fall when we 

 attribute the state "man" to the subject "child." It 

 behaves in much the same way as the movement, always 

 the same, of the cinematographical film, a movement 

 hidden in the apparatus and whose function it is to super- 

 pose the successive pictures on one another in order to 

 imitate the movement of the real object. In the second 

 proposition, "becoming" is a subject. It comes to the 

 front. It is the reality itself; childhood and manhood 

 are then only possible stops, mere views of the mind; 

 we now have to do with the objective movement itself, 

 and no longer with its cinematographical imitation. But 

 the first manner of expression is alone conformable to 

 our habits of language. We must, in order to adopt 

 the second, escape from the cinematographical mechanism 

 of thought. 



We must make complete abstraction of this mechan- 

 ism, if we wish to get rid at one stroke of the theoretical 

 absurdities that the question of movement raises. All 

 is obscure, all is contradictory when we try, with states, 

 to build up a transition. The obscurity is cleared up, 

 the contradiction vanishes, as soon as we place ourselves 

 along the transition, in order to distinguish states in it 



