Yes, if we suppose that the arrow can ever _be_ in a point of its
course. Yes again, if the arrow, which is moving, ever coincides with a
position, which is motionless. But the arrow never _is_ in any point of
its course. The most we can say is that it might be there, in this
sense, that it passes there and might stop there. It is true that if it
did stop there, it would be at rest there, and at this point it is no
longer movement that we should have to do with. The truth is that if the
arrow leaves the point A to fall down at the point B, its movement AB is
as simple, as indecomposable, in so far as it is movement, as the
tension of the bow that shoots it. As the shrapnel, bursting before it
falls to the ground, covers the explosive zone with an indivisible
danger, so the arrow which goes from A to B displays with a single
stroke, although over a certain extent of duration, its indivisible
mobility. Suppose an elastic stretched from A to B, could you divide its
extension? The course of the arrow is this very extension; it is equally
simple and equally undivided. It is a single and unique bound. You fix a
point C in the interval passed, and say that at a certain moment the
arrow was in C. If it had been there, it would have been stopped there,
and you would no longer have had a flight from A to B, but _two_
flights, one from A to C and the other from C to B, with an interval of
rest. A single movement is entirely, by the hypothesis, a movement
between two stops; if there are intermediate stops, it is no longer a
single movement. At bottom, the illusion arises from this, that the
movement, _once effected_, has laid along its course a motionless
trajectory on which we can count as many immobilities as we will. From
this we conclude that the movement, _whilst being effected_, lays at
each instant beneath it a position with which it coincides. We do not
see that the trajectory is created in one stroke, although a certain
time is required for it; and that though we can divide at will the
trajectory once created, we cannot divide its creation, which is an act
in progress and not a thing. To suppose that the moving body _is_ at a
point of its course is to cut the course in two by a snip of the
scissors at this point, and to substitute two trajectories for the
single trajectory which we were first considering. It is to distinguish
two successive acts where, by the hypothesis, there is only one. In
short, it is to attribute to the course itself of the arrow everything
that can be said of the interval that the arrow has traversed, that is
to say, to admit _a priori_ the absurdity that movement coincides with
immobility.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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