in its first movement, the flash
of conscious existence "in which the act of knowledge coincides with
the generating act of reality"? ("Report of the French Philosophical
Society", philosophical vocabulary, article "Immediate".)

Let us forget all philosophical controversies about realism and
idealism; let us try to reconstruct for ourselves a simplicity, a
virginal and candid glance, freeing us from the habits contracted in
the course of practical life. These then are our "images": not things
presented externally, nor states felt internally, not portraits of
exterior beings nor projections of internal moods, but appearances, in
the etymological sense of the word, appearances lived simply, without
our being distinguished from them, as yet neither subjective nor
objective, marking a moment of consciousness previous to the work of
reflection, from which proceeds the duality of subject and object. And
such also, in every order, appear the "immediate feelings"; as action in
birth, previous to language. (Cf. "Matter and Memory", Foreword to the
7th edition.)

Why depart from the immediate thus conceived as action and life? Because
it is quite impossible to do otherwise, for every initial fact can
be only such a pulsation of consciousness in its lived act, and the
fundamental and primitive direction of the least word, were it in an
enunciation of a problem or a doubt, can only be such a direction of
life and action. And we must certainly accord to this immediacy a value
of absolute knowledge, since it realises the coincidence of being and
knowledge.

But let us not think that the perception of immediacy is simple passive
perception, that it is sufficient to open our eyes to obtain it, today
when our utilitarian education is completed and has passed into the
state of habit. There is a difference between common experience and
the initial action of life; the first is a practical limitation of
the second. Hence it follows that a previous criticism is necessary to
return from one to the other, a criticism always in activity, always
open as a way of progressive investigation, always ready for the
reiteration and the renewal of effort.

In this task of purification there is doubtless always to be feared an
illusion of remaining in the primitive stage. By what criteria, by what
signs can we recognise that we have touched the goal? Pure fact is
shown to be such on the one hand because it remains independent of all
theoretical sy