this change down and hold it so as to examine it we find it slipping through our fingers, and the more we look into the supposed stages, such as things and qualities and events, by means of which common sense assumes that this change takes place, the more it becomes apparent that these stages are all of them mere arbitrary abstractions dragged from their context in a continuous process, fictitious halting places in a stream of change which goes on unbroken. Unbiassed attention to the actual fact cannot fail to convince us that what we know directly changes as a process and not by a series of stages. The creativeness of this process is perhaps at first not quite so obvious, but if we look into the fact once more, with the object of observing repetitions in it, we realize that we cannot find any. It is true that you can pick out qualities which at first appear to recur: you may, for example, see a rose and then a strawberry ice cream, and you may be inclined to say that here you saw the quality pink twice over. But you can only say that what you saw was the same both times by abstracting what we call the colour from the whole context in which it actually appeared on the two different occasions. In reality the colour is not known in isolation: it has its place, in the whole changing fact in a particular context which you may describe in abstract terms as consisting of the shape and smell and size of the object together with all the rest of your state of mind at the moment, which were not the same on the two different occasions, while further this pink colour was modified on each occasion by its position in the whole changing fact which may again be described in abstract terms by saying, for instance, that the pink on the occasion of your seeing the strawberry ice cream, coming after the pink on the occasion of your seeing the rose, had a peculiar flavour of “seen before” which was absent on the previous occasion. Thus although, by isolating “parts” of the whole process of changing which you know directly, you may bring yourself for a moment to suppose that you are acquainted with repetitions, when you look at the whole fact as it actually is, you see that what you know is never the same twice over, and that your direct experience forms, not a series of repetitions, but a creative process.