int of departure rather than arrival.

The new philosophy does not refuse to carry out this first critical
task; but it carries it out in its own way after determining more
precisely the real conditions of the problem. At the hour when
methodical research begins, the philosopher's mind is not clean-swept;
and it would be chimerical to wish to place oneself from the beginning,
by some act of transcendence, outside common thought. This thought
cannot be inspected and judged from outside. It constitutes, whether we
wish it or no, the sole concrete and positive point of departure. Let us
add that common-sense constitutes also our sole point of insertion into
reality. It can only then be a question of purifying it, not in any way
of replacing it. But we must distinguish in it what is pure fact, and
what is ulterior arrangement, in order to see what are the problems
which really are presented, and what are, on the contrary, the false
problems, the illusory problems, those which relate only to our
artifices of language.

The search for facts is then the first necessary moment of all
philosophy.

But common thought comes before us at the outset as a piece of very
composite alluvial ground. It is a beginning of positive science, and
also a residue of all philosophical opinions which have had some
vogue. That, however, is not its primary basis. Primum vivere, deinde
philosophari, says the proverb. In certain respects, "speculation is a
luxury, whilst action is a necessity." ("Creative Evolution", page 47.)
But "life requires us to apprehend things in the relation they have
to our needs." ("Laughter", page 154.) Hence comes the fundamental
utilitarianism of common-sense. Therefore if we wish to define it in
itself and for itself, and no longer as a first approximation of
such and such a system of metaphysics, it appears to us no longer as
rudimentary science and philosophy, but as an organisation of thought in
view of practical life. Thus it is that outside all speculative opinion
it is effectively lived by all. Its proper language, we may say, is the
language of customary perception and mechanical fabrication, therefore
a language relative to action, made to express action, modelled upon
action, translating things by the relations they maintain to our action;
I mean our corporal and synthetic action, which very evidently implies
thought, since it is a question of the action of a reasonable being, but
which thus contains a thou