Bergson, the closer we are to reality), in
shooting pains or the sense of intestinal movements, the feeling of a
change and of a motion is certainly given in the absence of all idea
of a _mobile_ or of distinct points (or even of a separate field)
through which it moves; consciousness begins with the sense of change,
and the terms of the felt process are only qualitative limits, bred
out of the felt process itself. Even a more paradoxical tenet of our
philosopher's finds it justification here. He says that the units of
motion are indivisible, that they are acts; so that to solve the
riddle about Achilles and the tortoise we need no mathematics of the
infinitesimal, but only to ask Achilles how he accomplishes the feat.
Achilles would reply that in so many strides he would do it; and we
may be surprised to learn that these strides are indivisible, so that,
apparently, Achilles could not have stumbled in the middle of one, and
taken only half of it. Of course, in nature, in what non-Bergsonians
call reality, he could: but not in his immediate feeling, for if he
had stumbled, the real stride, that which he was aware of taking,
would have been complete at the stumbling-point. It is certain that
consciousness comes in stretches, in breaths: all its data are
aesthetic wholes, like visions or snatches of melody; and we should
never be aware of anything were we not aware of something all at once.
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