n motion. There is no vehicle, no substance, no spatial
receptacle, resembling a theatre-scene, no material dummy successively
draped in coloured stuffs; on the contrary, it is the body or the atom
which should be subordinately defined as symbols of completed becoming.

Of movement thus conceived, indivisible and substantial, what better
image can we have than a musical evolution, a phrase in melody? That
is how we must work to conceive reality. If such a conception at first
appears obscure, let us credit experience, for ideas are gradually
illuminated by the very use we make of them, "the clarity of a concept
being hardly anything, at bottom, but the assurance once obtained
that we can handle it profitably." (H. Bergson, "Introduction to
Metaphysics".)

If we require to reach a conception of this kind with regard to change,
the Eleatic dialectic is there to establish it beyond dispute, and
positive science comes to the same conclusion, since it shows us
everywhere nothing but movements placed upon movements, never fixed
"things," except as temporary symbols of what we leave at a given moment
outside the field of study.

In any case, the difficulty of such a conception need not stop us; it is
little more than a difficulty of the imaginative order. And as for the
conception itself, or rather the corresponding intuition, it will share
the fate of all its predecessors: to our contemporaries it will be a
scandal, a century later a stroke of genius, after some centuries common
evidence, and finally an instinctive axiom.

V. The Problem of Consciousness. Duration and Liberty.

Armed with the method we have just described, Mr Bergson turned first of
all toward the problem of the ego: taking up his position in the centre
of mind, he has attempted to establish its independent reality by
examining its profound nature.

The first chapter of the "Essay on the Immediate Data" contains a
decisive criticism of the conceptions which claim to introduce number
and measure into the domain of the facts of consciousness.

Not that it is our business to reject as false the notion of
psychological intensity; but this notion demands interpretation, and the
least that we can say against the attempt to turn it into a notion of
size is that in doing so we are misunderstanding the specific character
of the object studied. The same reproach must be levelled against
association of ideas, the system of mechanical psychology of which the