y. Intuitions at first obscure, and only
anticipated, facts originally admitting no comparison, and as it were
irrational, become instructive and luminous by the fruitful use made of
them, and by the fertility which they manifest. In order to grasp the
complex content of reality, the mind must do itself violence, must
awaken its sleeping powers of revealing sympathy, must expand till it
becomes adapted to what formerly shocked its habits so much as almost
to seem contradictory to it. Such a task, moreover, is possible: we work
out its differential every moment, and its complete whole appears in the
sequence of centuries.

At bottom, the new theory of knowledge has nothing new in it except
the demand that all the facts shall be taken into account: it renews
duration in the thinking mind, and places itself at the point of view of
creative invention, not only at that of subsequent demonstration. Hence
its conception of experience, which, for it, is not simple information,
fitted into pre-existing frames, but elaboration of the frames
themselves.

Hence the problem of reason changes its aspect. A great mistake has been
made in thinking that Mr Bergson's doctrine misunderstands it: to deny
it and to place it are two different things. In its inmost essence,
reason is the demand for unity; that is why it is displayed as a faculty
of synthesis, and why its essential act is presented as apperception
of relation. It is unifying activity, not so much by a dialectic of
harmonious construction as by a view of reciprocal implication. But
all that, however shaded we suppose it, entails a previous analysis.
Therefore if we place ourselves in a perspective of intuition, I mean,
of complete perception, the demand for reason appears second only,
without being deprived, however, of its true task: it is an echo and
a recollection, an appeal and a promise of profound continuity, our
original anticipation and our final hope, in the bosom of the elementary
atomism which characterises the transitory region of language; and
reason thus marks the zone of contact between intelligence and instinct.

Is thought only possible under the law of number? Does reality only
become an object of knowledge as a system of distinct but regulated
factors and moments? Do ideas exist only by their mutual relations,
which first of all oppose them and afterwards force intelligence to move
endlessly from one term to another? If such were the case, reason would
cer