images; we think, first of all,
according to Mr Bergson's expression, by dynamic schemes. What is a
dynamic scheme? It is motive rather than representative, inexpressible
in itself, but a source of language containing not so much the images
or concepts in which it will develop as the indication of the path to be
followed in order to obtain them. It is not so much system as movement,
progress, genesis; it does not mark the gaze directed upon the various
points of one plane of deliberate contemplation so much as an effort to
pass through successive planes of thought in a direction leading from
intuition to analysis. We might define it by its function of calling up
images and concepts, representations which, for one and the same
scheme, are neither strictly determined nor anything in particular in
themselves, concurrent representations which have in common one and the
same logical power.

The representations called up form a body to the scheme, and the
relation of the scheme to the concepts and images which it calls up
resembles, mutatis mutandis, the relation pointed out by Mr Bergson
between an idea and its basis in the brain. In short, it is the very act
of creative thought which the dynamic scheme interprets, the act not yet
fixed in "results."

Nothing is easier than to illustrate the existence of this scheme.
Let us merely remark a few facts of current observation. Recall, for
example, the suggestive anxiety we experience when we seek to remember
a name; the precise syllables of the name still escape us, but we feel
them approaching, and already we possess something of them, since we
immediately reject those which do not answer to a certain direction of
expectancy; and by endeavouring to secure a more intimate feeling of
this direction we suddenly arouse the desired recollection.

In the same way, what does it mean to have the sense of a complex
situation in active life, if not that we perceive it, not as a static
group of explicit details, but as a meeting of powers allied or hostile,
convergent or divergent, directed towards this or that, of which the
aggregate whole tends of itself to awaken in us the initial reactions
which analyse it?

In the same way again, how do we learn, how can we assimilate a
vast system of conceits or images? Our task is not to concentrate an
enumerative attention on each individual factor; we should never get
away from them, the weight would be too heavy.

What we entrust to memor