are only
moments dipped out from the stream of time, snap-shots taken, as by
a kinetoscopic camera, at a life that in its original coming is
continuous. Useful as they are as samples of the garden, or to
re-enter the stream with, or to insert in our revolving lantern, they
have no value but these practical values. You cannot explain by them
what makes any single phenomenon be or go--you merely dot out the path
of appearances which it traverses. For you cannot make continuous
being out of discontinuities, and your concepts are discontinuous. The
stages into which you analyze a change are _states_, the change itself
goes on between them. It lies along their intervals, inhabits what
your definition fails to gather up, and thus eludes conceptual
explanation altogether.

'When the mathematician,' Bergson writes, 'calculates the state of
a system at the end of a time _t_, nothing need prevent him from
supposing that betweenwhiles the universe vanishes, in order suddenly
to appear again at the due moment in the new configuration. It is
only the _t_-th moment that counts--that which flows throughout the
intervals, namely real time, plays no part in his calculation.... In
short, the world on which the mathematician operates is a world which
dies and is born anew at every instant, like the world which Descartes
thought of when he spoke of a continued creation.' To know adequately
what really _happens_ we ought, Bergson insists, to see into the
intervals, but the mathematician sees only their extremities. He
fixes only a few results, he dots a curve and then interpolates, he
substitutes a tracing for a reality.

This being so undeniably the case, the history of the way in which
philosophy has dealt with it is curious. The ruling tradition in
philosophy has always been the platonic and aristotelian belief that
fixity is a nobler and worthier thing than change. Reality must be one
and unalterable. Concepts, being themselves fixities, agree best with
this fixed nature of truth, so that for any knowledge of ours to be
quite true it must be knowledge by universal concepts rather than
by particular experiences, for these notoriously are mutable and
corruptible. This is the tradition known as rationalism in philosophy,
and what I have called intellectualism is only the extreme application
of it. In spite of sceptics and empiricists, in spite of Protagoras,
Hume, and James Mill, rationalism has never been seriously questioned,
for its