derable as to force itself on our attention, to speak as if a new
state were placed alongside the previous one. Of this new state we
assume that it remains unvarying in its turn, and so on endlessly. The
apparent discontinuity of the psychical life is then due to our
attention being fixed on it by a series of separate acts: actually there
is only a gentle slope; but in following the broken line of our acts of
attention, we think we perceive separate steps. True, our psychic life
is full of the unforeseen. A thousand incidents arise, which seem to be
cut off from those which precede them, and to be disconnected from those
which follow. Discontinuous though they appear, however, in point of
fact they stand out against the continuity of a background on which they
are designed, and to which indeed they owe the intervals that separate
them; they are the beats of the drum which break forth here and there in
the symphony. Our attention fixes on them because they interest it more,
but each of them is borne by the fluid mass of our whole psychical
existence. Each is only the best illuminated point of a moving zone
which comprises all that we feel or think or will--all, in short, that
we are at any given moment. It is this entire zone which in reality
makes up our state. Now, states thus defined cannot be regarded as
distinct elements. They continue each other in an endless flow.

But, as our attention has distinguished and separated them artificially,
it is obliged next to reunite them by an artificial bond. It imagines,
therefore, a formless _ego_, indifferent and unchangeable, on which it
threads the psychic states which it has set up as independent entities.
Instead of a flux of fleeting shades merging into each other, it
perceives distinct and, so to speak, _solid_ colors, set side by side
like the beads of a necklace; it must perforce then suppose a thread,
also itself solid, to hold the beads together. But if this colorless
substratum is perpetually colored by that which covers it, it is for us,
in its indeterminateness, as if it did not exist, since we only perceive
what is colored, or, in other words, psychic states. As a matter of
fact, this substratum has no reality; it is merely a symbol intended to
recall unceasingly to our consciousness the artificial character of the
process by which the attention places clean-cut states side by side,
where actually there is a continuity which unfolds. If our existence
were composed