to establish between these two parallel series, incapable, by hypothesis, of ever meeting, a mysterious correspondence. Thrown back into consciousness, sensible qualities become incapable of recovering extensity. Relegated to space, and indeed to abstract space, where there is never but a single instant and where everything is always being born anew—movement abandons that solidarity of the present with the past which is its very essence. And as these two aspects of perception, quality and movement, have been made equally obscure, the phenomenon of perception, in which a consciousness, assumed to be shut up in itself and foreign to space, is supposed to translate what occurs in space, becomes a mystery.—But let us, on the contrary, banish all preconceived idea of interpreting or measuring, let us place ourselves face to face with immediate reality: at once we find that there is no impassable barrier, no essential difference, no real distinction even, between perception and the thing perceived, between quality and movement.
So we return, by a round-about way, to the conclusions worked out in the first chapter of this book. Our perception, we said, is originally in things rather than in the mind, without us rather than within. The several kinds of perception correspond to so many directions actually marked out in reality. But, we added, this
