y is really a dynamic scheme permitting us to
"regain" what we should not have succeeded in "retaining." In reality
our only "knowledge" is through such a scheme, which contains in the
state of potential implication an inexhaustible multiplicity ready to be
developed in actual representations.

How, finally, is any discovery made? Finding is solving a problem; and
to solve a problem we must always begin by supposing it solved. But of
what does such a hypothesis consist?

It is not an anticipated view of the solution, for then all would be
at an end; nor is it a simple formula putting in the present indicative
what the enunciation expressed in the future or the imperative, for then
nothing would be begun. It is exactly a dynamic scheme; that is to say,
a method in the state of directed tension; and often, the discovery
once realised as theory or system, capable of unending developments
and resurrections, remains by the best of itself a method and a dynamic
scheme.

But one last example will perhaps reveal the truth still more. "Anyone
who has attempted literary composition knows well that when the subject
has been long studied, all the documents collected, all the notes taken,
we need, to embark on the actual work of composition, something more, an
effort, often very painful, to place oneself suddenly in the very heart
of the subject, and to seek as deep down as possible an impulse to which
afterwards we shall only have to let ourselves go. This impulse,
once received, projects the mind on a road where it finds both the
information which it had collected and a thousand other details as well;
it develops and analyses itself in terms, the enumeration of which would
have no end; the further we advance, the more we discover; we shall
never succeed in saying everything; and yet, if we turn sharply round
towards the impulse we feel behind ourselves, to grasp it, it escapes;
for it was not a thing but a direction of movement, and though
indefinitely extensible, it is simplicity itself." (H. Bergson,
"Metaphysical and Moral Review", January 1903. The whole critique of
language is implicitly contained in this "Introduction to Metaphysics".)

The thought, then, which proceeds from one representation to another in
one and the same plane is one kind; that which follows one and the same
conceptual direction through descending planes is another. Creative and
fertile thought is the thought which adopts the second kind of work. The