le, for rests placed beside rests
will never be equivalent to a movement. How, with what is made, can we
reconstitute what is being made? How, for instance, from childhood once
posited as a _thing_, shall we pass to adolescence, when, by the
hypothesis, childhood only is given? If we look at it closely, we shall
see that our habitual manner of speaking, which is fashioned after our
habitual manner of thinking, leads us to actual logical
dead-locks--dead-locks to which we allow ourselves to be led without
anxiety, because we feel confusedly that we can always get out of them
if we like: all that we have to do, in fact, is to give up the
cinematographical habits of our intellect. When we say "The child
becomes a man," let us take care not to fathom too deeply the literal
meaning of the expression, or we shall find that, when we posit the
subject "child," the attribute "man" does not yet apply to it, and
that, when we express the attribute "man," it applies no more to the
subject "child." The reality, which is the _transition_ from childhood
to manhood, has slipped between our fingers. We have only the imaginary
stops "child" and "man," and we are very near to saying that one of
these stops _is_ the other, just as the arrow of Zeno _is_, according to
that philosopher, at all the points of the course. The truth is that if
language here were molded on reality, we should not say "The child
becomes the man," but "There is becoming from the child to the man." In
the first proposition, "becomes" is a verb of indeterminate meaning,
intended to mask the absurdity into which we fall when we attribute the
state "man" to the subject "child." It behaves in much the same way as
the movement, always the same, of the cinematographical film, a movement
hidden in the apparatus and whose function it is to superpose the
successive pictures on one another in order to imitate the movement of
the real object. In the second proposition, "becoming" is a subject. It
comes to the front. It is the reality itself; childhood and manhood are
then only possible stops, mere views of the mind; we now have to do with
the objective movement itself, and no longer with its cinematographical
imitation. But the first manner of expression is alone conformable to
our habits of language. We must, in order to adopt the second, escape
from the cinematographical mechanism of thought.

We must make complete abstraction of this mechanism, if we wish to get
rid at one s