If my views were generally judged to be paradoxical when they made their appearance, some of them are commonplace today; others bid fair to become so… - Henri Bergson

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If my views were generally judged to be paradoxical when they made their appearance, some of them are commonplace today; others bid fair to become so. Let us admit that they could not at first be accepted. It would have meant tearing oneself away from deeply-rooted habits, veritable extensions of nature. All our ways of speaking, thinking, perceiving imply in effect that immobility and immutability are there by right, that movement and change are superadded, like accidents, to things which, by themselves, do not move and, in themselves, do not change. The representation of change is that of qualities or states, which supposedly follow one another in a substance. Each of these qualities, each of these states would be something stable, change being made of their succession: as for substance, whose role is to support the states and qualities which succeed one another, it would be stability itself. Such is the logic immanent in our languages and formulated once and for all by Aristotle: the intelligence has as its essence to judge, and judgment operates by the attribution of a predicate to a subject. The subject, by the sole fact of being named, is defined as invariable; the variation will reside in the diversity of the states that one will affirm concerning it, one after another.