see by an example, if
we study more closely a capital point of Mr Bergson's philosophy, the
theory of external perception.

If the act of perceiving realises the lived communion of the subject
and object in the image, we must admit that here we have the perfect
knowledge which we wish to obtain always: we resign ourselves to
conception only for want of perception, and our ideal is to convert all
conception into perception. Doubtless we might define philosophy by this
same ideal, as an effort to expand our perceptive power until we render
it capable of grasping all the wealth and all the depth of reality at a
single glance. Too true it is that such an ideal remains inaccessible to
us. Something, however, is given us already in aesthetic intuition. Mr
Bergson has pointed it out in some admirable pages, ("Laughter",
pages 153-161.) and has explained to us also how philosophy pursues an
analogous end. (First lecture on "The Perception of Change", delivered
at Oxford, 26th May 1911.)

But philosophy must be conceived as an art implying science and
criticism, all experience and all reason. It is when we look at
metaphysics in this way that they become a positive order of veritable
knowledge. Kant has conclusively established that what lies beyond
language can only be attained by direct vision, not by dialectic
progress. His mistake was that he afterwards believed such a vision for
ever impossible; and whence did this mistake arise, if not from the fact
that, for his new vision, he exacted intuitive faculties quite different
from those at man's disposal. Here again the artist will be our
example and model. He appeals to no transcendent sense, but detaches
common-sense from its utilitarian prejudices. Let us do the same: we
shall obtain a similar result without lying ourselves open to Kant's
objections. This work is everywhere possible, and it is, par excellence,
the work of philosophy: let us try then to sketch it in relation to the
perception of matter.

We must distinguish two senses of the word "perception." This word means
first of all simple apprehension of immediacy, grasp of primitive fact.
When we use it in this sense, we will agree to say pure perception.
It is perhaps in place to see in it nothing but a limit which concrete
experience never presents unmixed, a direction of research rather than
the possession of a thing.

However that may be, the first sense is the fundamental sense, and what
it designates must