rinking is not
like the action of fighting: they are different _extensive_ movements.
And these three kinds of movement themselves--qualitative, evolutionary,
extensive--differ profoundly. The trick of our perception, like that of
our intelligence, like that of our language, consists in extracting from
these profoundly different becomings the single representation of
becoming _in general_, undefined becoming, a mere abstraction which by
itself says nothing and of which, indeed, it is very rarely that we
think. To this idea, always the same, and always obscure or unconscious,
we then join, in each particular case, one or several clear images that
represent _states_ and which serve to distinguish all becomings from
each other. It is this composition of a specified and definite state
with change general and undefined that we substitute for the specific
change. An infinite multiplicity of becomings variously colored, so to
speak, passes before our eyes: we manage so that we see only differences
of color, that is to say, differences of state, beneath which there is
supposed to flow, hidden from our view, a becoming always and everywhere
the same, invariably colorless.

Suppose we wish to portray on a screen a living picture, such as the
marching past of a regiment. There is one way in which it might first
occur to us to do it. That would be to cut out jointed figures
representing the soldiers, to give to each of them the movement of
marching, a movement varying from individual to individual although
common to the human species, and to throw the whole on the screen. We
should need to spend on this little game an enormous amount of work, and
even then we should obtain but a very poor result: how could it, at its
best, reproduce the suppleness and variety of life? Now, there is
another way of proceeding, more easy and at the same time more
effective. It is to take a series of snapshots of the passing regiment
and to throw these instantaneous views on the screen, so that they
replace each other very rapidly. This is what the cinematograph does.
With photographs, each of which represents the regiment in a fixed
attitude, it reconstitutes the mobility of the regiment marching. It is
true that if we had to do with photographs alone, however much we might
look at them, we should never see them animated: with immobility set
beside immobility, even endlessly, we could never make movement. In
order that the pictures may be animated, th