our active than with our theoretic life,
so here again Bergson's formulation seems unobjectionable. Persons who
have certain concepts are animated otherwise, pursue their own
vital careers differently. It doesn't necessarily follow that they
understand other vital careers more intimately.

Again it may be said that we combine old concepts into new ones,
conceiving thus such realities as the ether, God, souls, or what not,
of which our sensible life alone would leave us altogether ignorant.
This surely is an increase of our knowledge, and may well be called
a theoretical achievement. Yet here again Bergson's criticisms hold
good. Much as conception may tell us _about_ such invisible objects,
it sheds no ray of light into their interior. The completer, indeed,
our definitions of ether-waves, atoms, Gods, or souls become, the less
instead of the more intelligible do they appear to us. The learned
in such things are consequently beginning more and more to ascribe a
solely instrumental value to our concepts of them. Ether and molecules
may be like co-ordinates and averages, only so many crutches by the
help of which we practically perform the operation of getting about
among our sensible experiences.

We see from these considerations how easily the question of whether
the function of concepts is theoretical or practical may grow into
a logomachy. It may be better from this point of view to refuse to
recognize the alternative as a sharp one. The sole thing that is
certain in the midst of it all is that Bergson is absolutely right
in contending that the whole life of activity and change is inwardly
impenetrable to conceptual treatment, and that it opens itself only to
sympathetic apprehension at the hands of immediate feeling. All the
_whats_ as well as the _thats_ of reality, relational as well as
terminal, are in the end contents of immediate concrete perception.
Yet the remoter unperceived _arrangements_, temporal, spatial, and
logical, of these contents, are also something that we need to know as
well for the pleasure of the knowing as for the practical help. We may
call this need of arrangement a theoretic need or a practical need,
according as we choose to lay the emphasis; but Bergson is accurately
right when he limits conceptual knowledge to arrangement, and when he
insists that arrangement is the mere skirt and skin of the whole of
what we ought to know.

Note 2, page 266.--Gaston Rageot, _Revue Philosophique_, vo