ght which is itself eminently practical.

However, we are here regarding common-sense considered as a source of
fact. Its utilitarianism then becomes a kind of spontaneous metaphysics
from which we must detach ourselves. But is it not the very task of
positive science to execute this work of purification? Nothing of the
kind, despite appearances and despite intentions. Let us examine more
closely. The general categories of common thought, according to Mr
Bergson, ("Philosophic Intuition" in the "Metaphysical and Moral
Review", November 1911, page 825.) remain those of science; the main
roads traced by our senses through the continuity of reality are still
those along which science will pass; perception is an infant science
and science an adult perception; so much so that customary knowledge and
scientific knowledge, both of them destined to prepare our action upon
things, are of necessity two visions of the same kind, though of unequal
precision and reach. It does not follow that science does not practise
a certain disinterestedness as far as immediate mechanical utility is
concerned; it does not follow that it has no value as knowledge. But it
does not set itself genuinely free from the habits contracted in common
experience, and to inform its research it preserves the postulates of
common-sense; so that it always grasps things by their "actable" side,
by their point of contact with our faculty for action, under the forms
by which we handle them conceptually or practically, and all it attains
of reality is that by which nature is a possible object of language or
industry.

Let us turn now towards another aspect of natural thought, to
discover in it the germ of the necessary criticism. By the side of
"common-sense," which is the first rough-draft of positive science,
there is "good sense," which differs from it profoundly, and marks the
beginning of what we shall later on call philosophic intuition. (Cf. an
address on "Good Sense and Classical Studies", delivered by Mr Bergson
at the Concours general prize distribution, 30th July 1895.) It is a
sense of what is real, concrete, original, living, an art of equilibrium
and precision, a fine touch for complexities, continually feeling like
the antennae of some insects. It contains a certain distrust of the
logical faculty in respect of itself; it wages incessant war upon
intellectual automatism, upon ready-made ideas and linear deduction;
above all, it is anxious to locate