that it is not easy to know just what is excluded and what not.  Past and future, for example, conceptually separated by the cut to which we give the name of present, and defined as being the opposite sides of that cut, are to some extent, however brief, co-present with each other throughout experience.  The literally present moment is a purely verbal supposition, not a position; the only present ever realized concretely being the ‘passing moment’ in which the dying rearward of time and its dawning future forever mix their lights.  Say ‘now’ and it was even while you say it.

It is just intellectualism’s attempt to substitute static cuts for units of experienced duration that makes real motion so unintelligible.  The conception of the first half of the interval between Achilles and the tortoise excludes that of the last half, and the mathematical necessity of traversing it separately before the last half is traversed stands permanently in the way of the last half ever being traversed.  Meanwhile the living Achilles (who, for the purposes of this discussion, is only the abstract name of one phenomenon of impetus, just as the tortoise is of another) asks no leave of logic.  The velocity of his acts is an indivisible nature in them like the expansive tension in a spring compressed.  We define it conceptually as [s/t], but the s and t are only artificial cuts made after the fact, and indeed most artificial when we treat them in both runners as the same tracts of ‘objective’ space and time, for the experienced spaces and times in which the tortoise inwardly lives are probably as different as his velocity from the same things in Achilles.  The impetus of Achilles is one concrete fact, and carries space, time, and conquest over the inferior creature’s motion indivisibly in it.  He perceives nothing, while running, of the mathematician’s homogeneous time and space, of the infinitely numerous succession of cuts in both, or of their order.  End and beginning come for him in the one onrush, and all that he actually experiences is that, in the midst of a certain intense effort of his own, the rival is in point of fact outstripped.

We are so inveterately wedded to the conceptual decomposition of life that I know that this will seem to you like putting muddiest confusion in place of clearest thought, and relapsing into a molluscoid state of mind.  Yet I ask you whether the absolute superiority of our higher thought is so very clear, if all that it can find is impossibility in tasks which sense-experience so easily performs.

What makes you call real life confusion is that it presents, as if they were dissolved in one another, a lot of differents which conception breaks life’s flow by keeping apart.  But are not differents actually dissolved in one another?  Hasn’t every bit of experience its quality, its duration, its extension, its intensity, its urgency, its clearness, and many aspects besides, no one of which can exist