and to weigh, without any oversights;
it arrests the development of every principle and every method at the
precise point where too brutal an application would offend the delicacy
of reality; at every moment it collects the whole of our experience and
organises it in view of the present. It is, in a word, thought which
keeps its freedom, activity which remains awake, suppleness of
attitude, attention to life, an ever-renewed adjustment to suit ever-new
situations.

Its revealing virtue is derived from this moving contact with fact, and
this living effort of sympathy. This is what we must tend to transpose
from the practical to the speculative order.

What, then, will be for us the beginning of philosophy? After taking
cognisance of common utilitarianism, and to emerge from the relativity
in which it buries us, we seek a departure-point, a criterion, something
which decides the raising of inquiry. Where are we to find such a
principle, except in the very action of thought; I mean, this time, its
action of profound life independent of all practical aim? We shall thus
only be imitating the example of Descartes when solving the problem
of temporary doubt. What we shall term return to the immediate,
the primitive, the pure fact, will be the taking of each perception
considered as an act lived, a coloured moment of the Cogito, and this
will be for us a criterion and departure-point.

Let us specify this point. Immediate data or primitive data or pure data
are apprehended by us under forms of disinterested action; I mean that
they are first of all lived rather than conceived, that before becoming
material for science, they appear as moments of life; in brief, that
perception of them precedes their use.

It is at this stage previous to language that we are by these pure data
in intimate communion with reality itself, and the whole of our critical
task is to return to them through a regressive analysis, the goal
of which is gradually to make our clear intelligence equal to our
primordial intuition. The latter already constitutes a thought, a
preconceptual thought which is the intrinsic light of action, which is
action itself so far as it is luminous. Thus there is no question here
of restricting in any degree the part played by thought, but only of
distinguishing between the perceptive and theoretic functions of mind.

What is "the image" of which Mr Bergson speaks at the beginning of
"Matter and Mind" except, when grasped