ain a direct taking
possession is necessary. It is no use trying to approach duration: we
must install ourselves within it straight away. This is what the
intellect generally refuses to do, accustomed as it is to think the
moving by means of the unmovable.

The function of the intellect is to preside over actions. Now, in
action, it is the result that interests us; the means matter little
provided the end is attained. Thence it comes that we are altogether
bent on the end to be realized, generally trusting ourselves to it in
order that the idea may become an act; and thence it comes also that
only the goal where our activity will rest is pictured explicitly to our
mind: the movements constituting the action itself either elude our
consciousness or reach it only confusedly. Let us consider a very simple
act, like that of lifting the arm. Where should we be if we had to
imagine beforehand all the elementary contractions and tensions this act
involves, or even to perceive them, one by one, as they are
accomplished? But the mind is carried immediately to the end, that is to
say, to the schematic and simplified vision of the act supposed
accomplished. Then, if no antagonistic idea neutralizes the effect of
the first idea, the appropriate movements come of themselves to fill out
the plan, drawn in some way by the void of its gaps. The intellect,
then, only represents to the activity ends to attain, that is to say,
points of rest. And, from one end attained to another end attained, from
one rest to another rest, our activity is carried by a series of leaps,
during which our consciousness is turned away as much as possible from
the movement going on, to regard only the anticipated image of the
movement accomplished.

Now, in order that it may represent as unmovable the result of the act
which is being accomplished, the intellect must perceive, as also
unmovable, the surroundings in which this result is being framed. Our
activity is fitted into the material world. If matter appeared to us as
a perpetual flowing, we should assign no termination to any of our
actions. We should feel each of them dissolve as fast as it was
accomplished, and we should not anticipate an ever-fleeting future. In
order that our activity may leap from an _act_ to an _act_, it is
necessary that matter should pass from a _state_ to a _state_, for it is
only into a state of the material world that action can fit a result, so
as to be accomplished. But is