FUNCTIONS OF THE EYE
To what does THE PARTICLE correspond? The painter would ask: to what does the colour correspond? To sensation, whose cause is to be found in the sense in question. What sense gives the physicist and the painter the right to speak of the particle and of colour? Sight, it seems. Colour, seen as a quantity, grows, bigger or smaller depending on whether it comes closer or goes further away from, the eyes. It is the same with the particle. Optical phenomenon of TRANSLATION which becomes PERSPECTIVE when it is engaged in the business of an ocular accommodation to external spectacles. There is nothing extraordinary about that. The eye is quite capable of turning the Eiffel Tower into an atom or a petit pois into an immense globe, if it wasn’t - happily, in spite of the regrets that have been expressed about its supposed inadequacy - subject to the authority of the intelligence. THE PARTICLE, then, is a specialist term used to talk about a phenomenon that, although it is very small, is still of the nature of that reality which is accessible to the senses. It has everything, including immobility and limits, that is necessary for a phenomenon to be measured and weighed. It coincides with the essential principle of the stopped eye which is what MAKES magnitudes. The particle, or the eye in its static principle - they are one and the same thing. A purely intellectual observation is at one with what is essential in the sensorial organ in question. THE PARTICLE is reality in itself, apprehended in itself, total in itself, CONTINUOUS because it is independent in its own kingdom.
To what, now, does THE WAVE correspond? The painter would ask: to what does the chromatic circle correspond? To memory, which is the cause both of particular memories of the past and of foresight. Sight still has this property of being a sense under the control of memory, which is the lowest of the faculties of the soul, that by which we have the idea of movement. So, this is the property that corresponds most clearly to man’s mnemonic nature. The eye adapts itself to TRANSLATION. It can also turn on its centre and realise a CONTINUOUS MOVEMENT OF ROTATION, and it is thus that it enters into relation with the memory. This movement of rotation becomes the wave, the vibration, in the mechanical theory of light. In reality, if we want to understand the living synthesis, we must restore to this movement its own nature, which is independent of what is accessible to the senses and so independent of the particle. We must understand that living movement is immaterial - energy is a word that conveys this meaning without admitting it. It is dependent on a nature that is immaterial but nonetheless affirmed, which is embodied and made conscious in the memory. The memory of the particle, FELT at the level of the senses, whose return is anticipated at the higher stage, that of memory - this corresponds to the memory of the colour, FELT at the level of what is accessible to the senses, whose return is anticipated at the level of the memory. The return? Rather the growth, following an order by which the particle will be complemented by what it lacks if it is to realise its end, which is light. Just like the growth of the colour, following a regular order which complements it with what it lacks to realise its end, which is light. The wave and the rainbow follow the same principle of the same nature; wave and rainbow are two expressions of one and the same thing, which coincides with the continuous movement in rotation of the eye; a movement passing along the furrows which are of the nature of memory. Here again, intellectual deduction joins up again with the intellectual organ par excellence, as the eye was once called. The eye’s circular movement is reality in itself, CONTINUOUS because it is independent of sensation, of the particle, which, however, is what has set the process of its resonance going.
The error of wave theory lies in its wish to remain orthodox in relation to the dogmas of classicism. It aspires to realise a simultaneous accord between the mobile and the immobile. The tooth wheel of a machine, subtly disguised in a theory that is purely intellectual, allows us to present a sort of synthesis of space and time which, for the man of experience, is quite unsustainable - which can only satisfy the attitude of the man-spectator. It ends up with the mechanisation of life; it does nothing to advance our knowledge of that life. The reason which only intervenes for the purpose of explaining an event which it hasn’ t foreseen, is not the same reason as that which organises, following the rules of human nature, a human act, whose point of departure is in the senses and whose end is in the unity of light. Reason which only intervenes for the purpose of recording something, and reason which organises and directs the voyage from the beginning to the end - they are not the same. That is the source of the physicist’s difficulties. It is there that the contradictions appear. In this mechanism, which appears well regulated, in which matter and energy follow one another as particle and as vibration, troublesome elements, of a biological nature, are beginning to appear. The magnitude of the particle begins to alter; the wave shifts, slows down, speeds up. We cannot tell where all that is going. The fact is that the TRANSLATION of the eye is following its nature, contracting or expanding; the vibration, result of ocular rotation, changes the lengths of time as they succeed one another. And that is where, instead of deploring the contradictions, we ought rather to admire the possibilities of freedom that are given by the rule.
Indeed, the rainbow can serve to demonstrate the perfect integrity of the indeterminate in the determinate, of free will in dependence. It is the real synthesis of scientific time and of philosophical time. For, in the rainbow, the periods can go through a series of changes that is infinite, always following an inflexible finite order. The reason that organises and directs can understand that; the reason that is subject to observation cannot.
That is why, already, wave theory is carrying more than just the seeds of its own destruction. Bringing matter and energy ever closer together, speeding vibration up in a competition between extension and time, each searching to go beyond itself, the catastrophe is bound to follow. The whole lot will telescope together and extension and time fuse in an embrace in which both will disappear. As time - here understood as energy - has no reality for the intellectual observer, for whom only what is accessible to the senses can be real, we arrive at this conclusion: matter does not exist.