knowledge
of things is then no longer relative to the fundamental structure of our
mind, but only to its superficial and acquired habits, to the contingent
form which it takes on from our corporal functions and our lower needs.

The relativity of knowledge is therefore not final. In unmaking what our
needs have made we re-establish intuition in its original purity, and
resume contact with reality. ("Matter and Memory", page 203.)

That is how things are really presented. Here we are confronted by the
moving continuity of images. Pure perception is complete perception.
From it we pass to ordinary perception by diminution, throwing shadows
here and there: the reality perceived by common-sense is nothing
else actually than universal interaction rendered visible by its very
interruption at certain points.

Whence we have this double conclusion already formulated higher up: the
relation of perception to matter is that of the part to the whole, and
our consciousness is rather limited than relative. It must be stated
that primarily we perceive things in themselves, not in us; the
subjectivity of our current perception comes from our work of outlining
it in the bosom of reality, but the root of pure perception plunges into
full objectivity. If, at each point of matter, we were to succeed in
possessing the stream of total interaction of which it marks a wave, and
if we were to succeed in seeing the multiplicity of these points as a
qualitative heterogeneous flux without number or severance, we should
coincide with reality itself. It is true that such an ideal, while
inaccessible on the one hand, would not succeed on the other without
risk to knowledge; in fact, says Mr Bergson, ("Matter and Memory", page
38.) "to perceive all the influences of all the points of all bodies
would be to descend to the state of material object."

But a solution of this double difficulty remains possible, a dynamic
and approximate solution, which consists in looking for the absolute
intuition of matter in such a mobilisation of our perspective faculties
that we become capable of following, according to the circumstances,
all the paths of virtual perception of which the common anxiety for the
practical has made us choose one only, and capable of realising all the
infinitely different modes of qualification and discernment.

But we have still to see how this "complete experience" can be
practically thought.

IV. Critique of Language.

The