ch pass
quivers that here and there converge, is the image by which we are
forced to recognise a superior degree of reality.

But is this perceptible material, this qualitative continuity, the pure
fact in matter? Not yet. Perception, we said just now, is always in
reality complicated by memory. There is more truth in this than we had
seen. Reality is not a motionless spectrum, extending to our view
its infinite shades; it might rather be termed a leaping flame in the
spectrum. All is in passage, in process of becoming.

On this flux consciousness concentrates at long intervals, each time
condensing into one "quality" an immense period of the inner history of
things. "In just this way the thousand successive positions of a runner
contract into one single symbolic attitude, which our eye perceives,
which art reproduces, and which becomes for everybody the representation
of a man running." ("Matter and Memory", page 233.)

In the same way again, a red light, continuing one second, embodies such
a large number of elementary pulsations that it would take 25,000
years of our time to see its distinct passage. From here springs the
subjectivity of our perception. The different qualities correspond,
roughly speaking, to the different rhythms of contraction or
dilution, to the different degrees of inner tension in the perceiving
consciousness.

Pushing the case to its limits, and imagining a complete expansion,
matter would resolve into colourless disturbances, and become the "pure
matter" of the natural philosopher.

Let us now unite in one single continuity the different periods of the
preceding dialectic. Vibration, qualities, and bodies are none of them
reality by themselves; but all the same they are part of reality. And
absolute reality would be the whole of these degrees and moments, and
many others as well, no doubt. Or rather, to secure absolute intuition
of matter, we should have on the one hand to get rid of all that our
practical needs have constructed, restore on the other all the effective
tendencies they have extinguished, follow the complete scale of
qualitative concentrations and dilutions, and pass, by a kind of
sympathy, into the incessantly moving play of all the possible
innumerable contractions or resolutions; with the result that in the
end we should succeed, by a simultaneous view as it were, in grasping,
according to their infinitely various modes, the phases of this matter
which, though at present