are concepts but logical look-out stations along the path of becoming? what are they but motionless external views, taken at intervals, of an uninterrupted stream of movement?

Each of them isolates and fixes an aspect, "as the instantaneous lightning flashes on a storm-scene in the darkness." ("Matter and Memory", page 209.)

Placed together, they make a net laid in advance, a strong meshwork in which the human intelligence posts itself securely to spy the flux of reality, and seize it as it passes. Such a proceeding is made for the practical world, and is out of place in the speculative. Everywhere we are trying to find constants, identities, non-variants, states; and we imagine ideal science as an open eye which gazes for ever upon objects that do not move. The constant is the concrete support demanded by our action: the matter upon which we operate must not escape our grasp and slip through our hands, if we are to be able to work it. The constant, again, is the element of language, in which the word represents its inert permanence, in which it constitutes the solid fulcrum, the foundation and landmark of dialectic progress, being that which can be discarded by the mind, whose attention is thus free for other tasks. In this respect analysis by concepts is the natural method of common-sense. It consists in asking from time to time what point the object studied has reached, what it has become, in order to see what one could derive from it, or what it is fitting to say of it.

But this method has only a practical reach. Reality, which in its essence is becoming, passes through our concepts without ever letting itself be caught, as a moving body passes fixed points. When we filter it, we retain only its deposit, the result of the becoming drifted down to us.

Do the dams, canals, and buoys make the current of the river? Do the festoons of dead seaweed ranged along the sand make the rising tide? Let us beware of confounding the stream of becoming with the sharp outline of its result. Analysis by concepts is a cinematograph method, and it is plain that the inner organisation of the movement is not seen in the moving pictures. Every moment we have fixed views of moving objects. With such conceptual sections taken in the stream of continuity, however many we accumulate, should we ever reconstruct the movement itself, the dynamic connection, the march of the images, the transition from one view to another? This capacity for movement must be contained in the picture apparatus, and must therefore be given in addition to the views themselves; and nothing can better prove how, after all, movement is never explicable except by itself, never grasped except in itself.

But if we take movement as our principle, it is, on the contrary, possible, and even easy, to slacken speed by imperceptible degrees, and stop dead.

From a dead stop we shall never get our movement again; but rest can very well be conceived as the limit of movement, as its arrest or extinction; for rest is less than movement.

In this way the true philosophical method, which is the inverse of the common method, consists in taking up a position from the very outset in the bosom of becoming, in adopting its changing curves and variable tension, in sympathising with the rhythm of its genesis, in perceiving all existence from within, as a growth, in following it in its inner generation; in short, in promoting movement to fundamental reality, and, inversely, in degrading fixed states to the rank of secondary and derived reality.

And thus, to come back to the example of the human personality, the philosopher must seek in the ego not so much a ready-made unity or multiplicity as, if I may venture the expression, two antagonistic and correlative movements of unification and plurification.

There is then a radical difference between philosophic intuition and conceptual analysis. The latter delights in the play of dialectic, in fountains of knowledge, where it is interested only in the immovable basins; the former goes back to the source of the concepts, and seeks to possess it where it gushes out. Analysis cuts the channels; intuition supplies the water. Intuition acquires and analysis expends.

It is not a question of banning analysis; science could not do without it, and philosophy could not do without science. But we must reserve for it its normal place and its just task.

Concepts are the deposited sediment of intuition: intuition produces the concepts, not the concepts intuition. From the heart of intuition you will have no difficulty in seeing how it splits up and analyses into concepts, concepts of such and such a kind or such and such a shade. But by successive analyses you will never reconstruct the least intuition, just as, no matter how you distribute water, you will never reconstruct the reservoir in its original condition.

Begin from intuition: it is a summit from which we can descend by infinite slopes; it is a picture which we can place in an infinite number of frames. But all the frames together will not recompose the picture, and the lower ends of all the slopes will not explain how they meet at the summit. Intuition is a necessary beginning; it is the impulse which sets the analysis in motion, and gives it direction; it is the sounding which brings it to solid bottom; the soul which assures its unity. "I shall never understand how black and white interpenetrate, if I have not seen grey, but I understand without trouble, after once seeing grey, how we can regard it from the double point of view of black and white." ("Introduction to Metaphysics.")

Here are some letters which you can arrange in chains in a thousand ways: the indivisible sense running along the chain, and making one phrase of it, is the original cause of the writing, not its consequence. Thus it is with intuition in relation to analysis. But beginnings and generative activities are the proper object of the philosopher. Thus the conversion and reform incumbent on him consist essentially in a transition from the analytic to the intuitive point of view.

The result is that the chosen instrument of philosophic thought is metaphor; and of metaphor we know Mr Bergson to be an incomparable master. What we have to do, he says himself, is "to elicit a certain active force which in most men is liable to be trammelled by mental habits more useful to life," to awaken in them the feeling of the immediate, original, and concrete. But "many different images, borrowed from very different orders of things, can, by their convergent action, direct consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to be seized. By choosing images as unlike as possible, we prevent any one of them from usurping the place of the intuition it is intended to call up, since it would in that case be immediately routed by its rivals. In making them all, despite their different aspects, demand of our mind the same kind of attention, and in some way the same degree of tension, we accustom our consciousness little by little to a quite peculiar and well-determined disposition, precisely the one which it ought to adopt to appear to itself unmasked." ("Introduction to Metaphysics".)

Strictly speaking, the intuition of immediacy is inexpressible. But it can be suggested and called up. How? By ringing it round with concurrent metaphors. Our aim is to modify the habits of imagination in ourselves which are opposed to a simple and direct view, to break through the mechanical imagery in which we have allowed ourselves to be caught; and it is by awakening other imagery and other habits that we can succeed in so doing.