a special chapter.
Suffice it to say that the intellect represents _becoming_ as a series
of _states_, each of which is homogeneous with itself and consequently
does not change. Is our attention called to the internal change of one
of these states? At once we decompose it into another series of states
which, reunited, will be supposed to make up this internal modification.
Each of these new states must be invariable, or else their internal
change, if we are forced to notice it, must be resolved again into a
fresh series of invariable states, and so on to infinity. Here again,
thinking consists in reconstituting, and, naturally, it is with _given_
elements, and consequently with _stable_ elements, that we reconstitute.
So that, though we may do our best to imitate the mobility of becoming
by an addition that is ever going on, becoming itself slips through our
fingers just when we think we are holding it tight.

Precisely because it is always trying to reconstitute, and to
reconstitute with what is given, the intellect lets what is _new_ in
each moment of a history escape. It does not admit the unforeseeable. It
rejects all creation. That definite antecedents bring forth a definite
consequent, calculable as a function of them, is what satisfies our
intellect. That a definite end calls forth definite means to attain it,
is what we also understand. In both cases we have to do with the known
which is combined with the known, in short, with the old which is
repeated. Our intellect is there at its ease; and, whatever be the
object, it will abstract, separate, eliminate, so as to substitute for
the object itself, if necessary, an approximate equivalent in which
things will happen in this way. But that each instant is a fresh
endowment, that the new is ever upspringing, that the form just come
into existence (although, _when once produced_, it may be regarded as an
effect determined by its causes) could never have been foreseen--because
the causes here, unique in their kind, are part of the effect, have come
into existence with it, and are determined by it as much as they
determine it--all this we can feel within ourselves and also divine, by
sympathy, outside ourselves, but we cannot think it, in the strict sense
of the word, nor express it in terms of pure understanding. No wonder at
that: we must remember what our intellect is meant for. The causality it
seeks and finds everywhere expresses the very mechanism of our industry,