le photographic views; concrete thickness
escapes them. However exact, varied, or numerous we suppose them, they
can certainly recall their object, but not reveal it to any one who had
not had any direct intuition of it. Nothing is easier than to trace the
plan of a body in four dimensions; all the same, this drawing does not
admit "visualisation in space" as is the case with ordinary bodies,
for want of a previous intuition which it would awaken: thus it is with
concepts in relation to reality. Like photographs and like plans, they
are extracted from reality, but we are not able to say that they were
contained in it; and many of them besides are not so much as extracts;
they are simple systematised notes, in fact, notes made upon notes. In
other terms, concepts do not represent pieces, parts, or elements of
reality. Literally they are nothing but simple symbolic notations. To
wish to make integral factors of them would be as strange an illusion as
that of seeing in the co-ordinates of a geometric point the constitutive
essence of that point.

We do not make things with symbols, any more than we should reconstruct
a picture with the qualifications which classify it.

Whence, then, comes the natural inclination of thought towards the
concept? From the fact that thought delights in artifices which
facilitate analysis and language.

The first of these artifices is that from which results the possibility
of decomposition or recomposition according to arbitrary laws. For
that we need a previous substitution of symbols for things. Nothing
demonstrates this better than the celebrated arguments which we owe to
Zeno of Elea. Mr Bergson returns to the discussion of them over and over
again. ("Essay on the Immediate Data", pages 85-86; "Matter and Memory",
pages 211-213, "Creative Evolution", pages 333-337.)

The nerve of the reasoning there consists in the evident absurdity
there would be in conceiving an inexhaustible exhausted, an unachievable
achieved; in short, a total actually completed, and yet obtained by the
successive addition of an infinite number of terms.

But the question is to know whether a movement can be considered as a
numerical multiplicity. Virtual divisibility there is, no doubt, but not
actual division; divisibility is indefinite, whereas an actual division,
if it respects the inner articulations of reality, is bound to halt at a
limited number of phases.

What we divide and measure is the track of the