rays the continuous spectrum of a luminous body; whilst the rhythm of duration, and the degree of tension peculiar to our consciousness, limit us to the apprehension of certain qualities only.

What then have we to do to progress towards absolute knowledge? Not to quit experience: quite the contrary; but to extend it and diversify it by science, while, at the same time, by criticism, we correct in it the disturbing effects of action, and finally quicken all the results thus obtained by an effort of sympathy which will make us familiar with the object until we feel its profound throbbing and its inner wealth.

In connection with this last vital point, which is decisive, call to mind a celebrated page of Sainte-Beuve where he defines his method: "Enter into your author, make yourself at home in him, produce him under his different aspects, make him live, move, and speak as he must have done; follow him to his fireside and in his domestic habits, as closely as you can...

"Study him, turn him round and round, ask him questions at your leisure; place him before you...Every feature will appear in its turn, and take the place of the man himself in this expression...

"An individual reality will gradually blend with and become incarnate in the vague, abstract, and general type...There is our man..." Yes, that is exactly what we want: it could not be better put. Transpose this page from the literary to the metaphysical order, and you have intuition, as defined by Mr Bergson. You have the return to immediacy.

But a new problem then arises: Is not our intuition of immediacy in danger of remaining inexpressible? For our language has been formed in view of practical life, not of pure knowledge.

IV.

The immediate perception of reality is not all; we have still to translate this perception into intelligible language, into a connected chain of concepts; failing which, it would seem, we should not have knowledge in the strict sense of the word, we should not have truth.

Without language, intuition, supposing it came to birth, would remain intransmissible and incommunicable, and would perish in a solitary cry. By language alone are we enabled to submit it to a positive test: the letter is the ballast of the mind, the body which allows it to act, and in acting to scatter the unreal delusions of dream.

The act of pure intuition demands so great an inner tension from thought that it can only be very rare and very fugitive: a few rapid gleams here and there; and these dawning glimpses must be sustained, and afterwards united, and that again is the work of language.

But while language is thus necessary, no less necessary is a criticism of ordinary language, and of the methods familiar to the understanding. These forms of reflected knowledge, these processes of analysis really convey secretly all the postulates of practical action. But it is imperative that language should translate, not betray; that the body of formulae should not stifle the soul of intuition. We shall see in what the work of reform and conversion imposed on the philosopher precisely consists.

The attitude of the ordinary proceedings of common thought can be stated in a few words. Place the object studied before yourself as an exterior "thing." Then place yourself outside it, in perspective, at points of vantage on a circumference, whence you can only see the object of your investigation at a distance, with such interval as would be sufficient for the contemplation of a picture; in short, move round the object instead of entering boldly into it. But these proceedings lead to what I shall term analysis by concepts; that is to say, the attempt to resolve all reality into general ideas.

What are concepts and abstract ideas really, but distant and simplified views, species of model drawings, giving only a few summary features of their object, which vary according to direction and angle? By means of them we claim to determine the object from outside, as if, in order to know it, it were sufficient to enclose it in a system of logical sides and angles.

And perhaps in this way we do really grasp it, perhaps we do establish its precise description, but we do not penetrate it.

Concepts translate relations resulting from comparisons by which each object is finally expressed as a function of what it is not. They dismember it, divide it up piece by piece, and mount it in various frames. They lay hold of it only by ends and corners, by resemblances and differences. Is not that obviously what is done by the converting theories which explain the soul by the body, life by matter, quality by movements, space itself by pure number? Is not that what is done generally by all criticisms, all doctrines which connect one idea to another, or to a group of other ideas?

In this way we reach only the surface of things, the reciprocal contacts, mutual intersections, and parts common, but not the organic unity nor the inner essence.

In vain we multiply our points of view, our perspectives and plane projections: no accumulation of this kind will reconstruct the concrete solid. We can pass from an object directly perceived to the pictures which represent it, the prints which represent the pictures, the scheme representing the prints, because each stage contains less than the one before, and is obtained from it by simple diminution.

But, inversely, you may take all the schemes, prints, pictures you like—supposing that it is not absurd to conceive as given what is by nature interminable and inexhaustible, lending itself to indefinite enumeration and endless development and multiplicity—but you will never recompose the profound and original unity of the source.

How, by forcing yourself to seek the object outside itself, where it certainly is not, except in echo and reflection, would you ever find its intimate and specific reality? You are but condemning yourself to symbolism, for one "thing" can only be in another symbolically.

To go further still, your knowledge of things will remain irremediably relative, relative to the symbols selected and the points of view adopted. Everything will happen as in a movement of which the appearance and formula vary with the spot from which you regard it, with the marks to which you relate it.

Absolute revelation is only given to the man who passes into the object, flings himself upon its stream, and lives within its rhythm. The thesis which maintains the inevitable relativity of all human knowledge originates mainly from the metaphors employed to describe the act of knowledge. The subject occupies this point, the object that; how are we to span the distance? Our perceptory organs fill the interval; how are we to grasp anything but what reaches us in the receiver at the end of the wire?

The mind itself is a projecting lantern playing a shaft of light on nature; how should it do otherwise than tint nature its own colour?

But these difficulties all arise out of the spatial metaphors employed; and these metaphors in their turn do little but illustrate and translate the common method of analysis by concepts: and this method is essentially regulated by the practical needs of action and language.

The philosopher must adopt an attitude entirely inverse; not keep at a distance from things, but listen in a manner to their inward breathing, and, above all, supply the effort of sympathy by which he establishes himself in the object, becomes on intimate terms with it, tunes himself to its rhythm, and, in a word, lives it. There is really nothing mysterious or strange in this.

Consider your daily judgments in matters of art, profession, or sport.

Between knowledge by theory and knowledge by experience, between understanding by external analogy and perception by profound intuition, what difference and divergence there is!

Who has absolute knowledge of a machine, the student who analyses it in mechanical theorems, or the engineer who has lived in comradeship with it, even to sharing the physical sensation of its laboured or