ualities_, _forms_, _positions_, or
_intentions_, as the case may be, multiply the number of them as you
will, let the interval between two consecutive states be infinitely
small: before the intervening movement you will always experience the
disappointment of the child who tries by clapping his hands together to
crush the smoke. The movement slips through the interval, because every
attempt to reconstitute change out of states implies the absurd
proposition, that movement is made of immobilities.

Philosophy perceived this as soon as it opened its eyes. The arguments
of Zeno of Elea, although formulated with a very different intention,
have no other meaning.

Take the flying arrow. At every moment, says Zeno, it is motionless, for
it cannot have time to move, that is, to occupy at least two successive
positions, unless at least two moments are allowed it. At a given
moment, therefore, it is at rest at a given point. Motionless in each
point of its course, it is motionless during all the time that it is
moving.

Yes, if we suppose that the arrow can ever _be_ in a point of its
course. Yes again, if the arrow, which is moving, ever coincides with a
position, which is motionless. But the arrow never _is_ in any point of
its course. The most we can say is that it might be there, in this
sense, that it passes there and might stop there. It is true that if it
did stop there, it would be at rest there, and at this point it is no
longer movement that we should have to do with. The truth is that if the
arrow leaves the point A to fall down at the point B, its movement AB is
as simple, as indecomposable, in so far as it is movement, as the
tension of the bow that shoots it. As the shrapnel, bursting before it
falls to the ground, covers the explosive zone with an indivisible
danger, so the arrow which goes from A to B displays with a single
stroke, although over a certain extent of duration, its indivisible
mobility. Suppose an elastic stretched from A to B, could you divide its
extension? The course of the arrow is this very extension; it is equally
simple and equally undivided. It is a single and unique bound. You fix a
point C in the interval passed, and say that at a certain moment the
arrow was in C. If it had been there, it would have been stopped there,
and you would no longer have had a flight from A to B, but _two_
flights, one from A to C and the other from C to B, with an interval of
rest. A single movement is enti