th of becoming? what are they
but motionless external views, taken at intervals, of an uninterrupted
stream of movement?

Each of them isolates and fixes an aspect, "as the instantaneous
lightning flashes on a storm-scene in the darkness." ("Matter and
Memory", page 209.)

Placed together, they make a net laid in advance, a strong meshwork in
which the human intelligence posts itself securely to spy the flux of
reality, and seize it as it passes. Such a proceeding is made for the
practical world, and is out of place in the speculative. Everywhere we
are trying to find constants, identities, non-variants, states; and we
imagine ideal science as an open eye which gazes for ever upon objects
that do not move. The constant is the concrete support demanded by our
action: the matter upon which we operate must not escape our grasp and
slip through our hands, if we are to be able to work it. The constant,
again, is the element of language, in which the word represents its
inert permanence, in which it constitutes the solid fulcrum, the
foundation and landmark of dialectic progress, being that which can be
discarded by the mind, whose attention is thus free for other tasks. In
this respect analysis by concepts is the natural method of common-sense.
It consists in asking from time to time what point the object studied
has reached, what it has become, in order to see what one could derive
from it, or what it is fitting to say of it.

But this method has only a practical reach. Reality, which in its
essence is becoming, passes through our concepts without ever letting
itself be caught, as a moving body passes fixed points. When we filter
it, we retain only its deposit, the result of the becoming drifted down
to us.

Do the dams, canals, and buoys make the current of the river? Do the
festoons of dead seaweed ranged along the sand make the rising tide? Let
us beware of confounding the stream of becoming with the sharp outline
of its result. Analysis by concepts is a cinematograph method, and it
is plain that the inner organisation of the movement is not seen in the
moving pictures. Every moment we have fixed views of moving objects.
With such conceptual sections taken in the stream of continuity, however
many we accumulate, should we ever reconstruct the movement itself, the
dynamic connection, the march of the images, the transition from one
view to another? This capacity for movement must be contained in the
picture apparatus