ys representable by the same word, no matter what
the circumstances: they are no longer living and coloured ideas, but
abstract, motionless, and neutral forms, without shades or gradations,
without distinction of case, characterising two points of view from
which you can observe anything and everything. This being so, how
could the application of these forms help us to grasp the original and
peculiar nature of the unity and multiplicity of the ego? Still further,
how could we, between two such entities, statically defined by
their opposition, ever imagine a synthesis? Correctly speaking, the
interesting question is not whether there is unity, multiplicity,
combination, one with the other, but to see what sort of unity,
multiplicity, or combination realises the case in point; above all,
to understand how the living person is at once multiple unity and
one multiplicity, how these two poles of conceptual dissociation are
connected, how these two diverging branches of abstraction join at
the roots. The interesting point, in a word, is not the two symbolical
colourless marks indicating the two ends of the spectrum; it is the
continuity between, with its changing wealth of colouring, and the
double progress of shades which resolve it into red and violet.

But it is impossible to arrive at this concrete transition unless we
begin from direct intuition and descend to the analysing concepts.

Again, the same duty of reversing our familiar attitude, of inverting
our customary proceeding, becomes ours for another reason. The
conceptual atomism of common thought leads it to place movement in a
lower order than rest, fact in a lower order than becoming. According
to common thought, movement is added to the atom, as a supplementary
accident to a body previously at rest; and, by becoming, the
pre-existent terms are strung together like pearls on a necklace.
It delights in rest, and endeavours to bring to rest all that moves.
Immobility appears to it to be the base of existence. It decomposes
and pulverises every change and every phenomenon, until it finds
the invariable element in them. It is immobility which it esteems
as primary, fundamental, intelligible of itself; and motion, on the
contrary, which it seeks to explain as a function of immobility. And
so it tends, out of progresses and transitions, to make things. To see
distinctly, it appears to need a dead halt. What indeed are concepts but
logical look-out stations along the pa