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 a