To these three ways of seeing correspond three categories of words: _adjectives_, _substantives_, and _verbs_, which are the primordial elements of language. Adjectives and substantives therefore symbolize _states_. But the verb itself, if we keep to the clear part of the idea it calls up, hardly expresses anything else.
Now, if we try to characterize more precisely our natural attitude towards Becoming, this is what we find. Becoming is infinitely varied. That which goes from yellow to green is not like that which goes from green to blue: they are different _qualitative_ movements. That which goes from flower to fruit is not like that which goes from larva to nymph and from nymph to perfect insect: they are different _evolutionary_ movements. The action of eating or of drinking is not like the action of fighting: they are different _extensive_ movements. And these three kinds of movement themselves--qualitative, evolutionary, extensive--differ profoundly. The trick of our perception, like that of our intelligence, like that of our language, consists in extracting from these profoundly different becomings the single representation of becoming _in general_, undefined becoming, a mere abstraction which by itself says nothing and of which, indeed, it is very rarely that we think. To this idea, always the same, and always obscure or unconscious, we then join, in each particular case, one or several clear images that represent _states_ and which serve to distinguish all becomings from each other. It is this composition of a specified and definite state with change general and undefined that we substitute for the specific change. An infinite multiplicity of becomings variously colored, so to speak, passes before our eyes: we manage so that we see only differences of color, that is to say, differences of state, beneath which there is supposed to flow, hidden from our view, a becoming always and everywhere the same, invariably colorless.