That diversion of life towards mechanism is the real cause of laughter - Henri Bergson

I need not recall the arguments of Zeno of Elea. They all involve the confusion of movement with the space covered, or at least the conviction that one can treat movement as one treats space, divide it without taking account of its articulations. Achilles, they say, will never overtake the tortoise he is pursuing, for when he arrives at the point where the tortoise was the latter will have had time to go further, and so on indefinitely. Philosophers have refuted this argument in numerous ways, and ways so different that each of these refutations deprives the others of the right to be considered definitive. There would have been, nevertheless, a very simple means of making short work of the difficulty: that would have been to question Achilles. For since Achilles finally catches up to the tortoise and even passes it, he must know better than anyone else how he goes about it. The ancient philosopher who demonstrated the possibility of movement by walking was right: his only mistake was to make the gesture without adding a commentary. Suppose then we ask Achilles to comment on his race: here, doubtless, is what he will answer: “Zeno insists that I go from the point where I am to the point the tortoise has left, from that point to the next point it has left, etc., etc.; that is his procedure for making me run. But I go about it otherwise. I take a first step, then a second, and so on: finally, after a certain number of steps, I take a last one by which I skip ahead of the tortoise. I thus accomplish a series of indivisible acts. My course is the series of these acts. You can distinguish its parts by the number of steps it involves. But you have not the right to disarticulate it according to another law, or to suppose it articulated in another way. To proceed as Zeno does is to admit that the race can be arbitrarily broken up like the space which has been covered; it is to believe that the passage is in reality applied to the trajectory; it is making movement and immobil

Contudo, a sociedade exige algo mais ainda. Não basta viver; importa viver bem. Agora o que ela tem a temer é que cada um de nós, satisfeito em atentar para o que respeita ao essencial da vida, se deixe ir quanto ao mais pelo automatismo fácil dos hábitos adquiridos. O que também deve recear é que os membros de que ela se compõe, em vez de terem por alvo um equilíbrio cada vez mais delicado de vontades a inserir-se cada vez com maior exatidão umas nas outras, se contentem com o respeitar as condições fundamentais desse equilíbrio: um acordo prévio entre as pessoas não lhe basta, mas a sociedade há de querer um esforço constante de adaptação recíproca. Toda rigidez do caráter, do espírito e mesmo do corpo, será, pois, suspeita à sociedade, por constituir indício possível de uma atividade que adormece, e também de uma atividade que se isola, tendendo a se afastar do centro comum em torno do qual a sociedade gravita; em suma, indício de uma excentricidade.

The theory of knowledge is inseparable from the theory of life. They must unite so that each may move the other forward.