movement once
accomplished, not the movement itself: it is the trajectory, not the
traject. In the trajectory we can count endless positions; that is to
say, possible halts. Let us not suppose that the moving body meets these
elements all ready-marked. Hence what the Eleatic dialectic illustrates
is a case of incommensurability; the radical inability of analysis
to end a certain task; our powerlessness to explain the fact of
the transit, if we apply to it such and such modes of numerical
decomposition or recomposition, which are valid only for space; the
impossibility of conceiving becoming as susceptible of being cut up into
arbitrary segments, and afterwards reconstructed by summing of terms
according to some law or other; in short, it is the nature of movement,
which is without division, number, or concept.

But thought delights in analyses regulated by the sole consideration
of easy language; hence its tendency to an arithmetic and geometry of
concepts, in spite of the disastrous consequences; and thus the Eleatic
paradox is no less instructive in its specious character than in the
solution which it embodies.

At bottom, natural thought, I mean thought which abandons itself to
its double inclination of synthetic idleness and useful industry, is
a thought haunted by anxieties of the operating manual, anxieties of
fabrication.

What does it care about the fluxes of reality and dynamic depths? It is
only interested in the outcrops scattered here and there over the firm
soil of the practical, and it solidifies "terms" like stakes plunged in
a moving ground. Hence comes the configuration of its spontaneous logic
to a geometry of solids, and hence come concepts, the instantaneous
moments taken in transitions.

Scientific thought, again, preserves the same habits and the same
preferences. It seeks only what repeats, what can be counted.
Everywhere, when it theorises, it tends to establish static relations
between composing unities which form a homogeneous and disconnected
multiplicity.

Its very instruments bias it in that direction. The apparatus of the
laboratory really grasps nothing but arrangement and coincidence; in a
word, states not transitions. Even in cases of contrary appearance, for
example, when we determine a weight by observing the oscillation of a
balance and not its rest, we are interested in regular recurrence, in
a symmetry, in something therefore which is of the nature of an
equilibrium and a fi