mbolism, because the critique of language allows it to
exist thus as an indissoluble residue, because we are unable not to
"live" it, even when we free ourselves from the anxiety of utility; on
the other hand, because it dominates all systems, and imposes itself
equally upon them all as the common source from which they derive by
diverging analyses, and in which they become reconciled. Assuredly,
to attain it, to extricate it, we must appeal to the revelations of
science, to the exercise of deliberate thought. But this employment of
analysis against analysis does not in any way constitute a circle, for
it tends only to destroy prejudices which have become unconscious: it is
a simple artifice destined to break off habits and to scatter illusions
by changing the points of view. Once set free, once again become capable
of direct and simple view, what we accept as fact is what bears no trace
of synthetic elaboration. It is true that here a last objection presents
itself: how shall we think this limit, purely given, to any degree at
all in fact, if it must precede all language?

The answer is easy. Why speak thus of limit? This word has two senses:
at one time it designates a last term in a series of approximations,
and at another a certain internal character of convergence, a certain
quality of progression.

Now, it is the second sense only which suits the case before us.
Immediacy contains no matter statically defined, and no thing. The
notion of fact is quite relative. What is fact in one case may become
construction in another. For example, the percepts of common experience
are facts for the physicist, and constructions for the philosopher; the
same applies to a table of numerical results, for the scholar who is
trying to establish a theory, or for the observer and the psychologist.
We may then conceive a series in which each term is fact in relation
to those which follow it, and constructed in relation to those which
precede it. The expression "primitive fact" then determines not so
much a final object as a direction of thought, a movement of critical
retrogression, a journey from the most to the least elaborate, and
the "contact with pure immediacy" is only the effort, more and more
prolonged, to convert the elements of experience into real and profound
action.

III. Theory of Perception.

Of what the work of return to immediacy consists, and how the intuition
which it calls up reveals absolute fact, we shall