ding parcels out, arrests, and quantifies,
whereas reality, as it appears to immediate intuition, is a moving
series, a flux of blended qualities.

That is to say, our understanding solidifies all that it touches. Have
we not here exactly the essential postulates of action and speech? To
speak, as to act, we must have separable elements, terms and objects
which remain inert while the operation goes on, maintaining between
themselves the constant relations which find their most perfect and
ideal presentment in mathematics.

Everything tends, then, to incline us towards the hypothesis in
question. Let us regard it henceforward as expressing a fact.

The forms of knowledge elaborated by common-sense were not originally
intended to allow us to see reality as it is.

Their task was rather, and remains so, to enable us to grasp its
practical aspect. It is for that they are made, not for philosophical
speculation.

Now these forms nevertheless have existed in us as inveterate habits,
soon becoming unconscious, even when we have reached the point of
desiring knowledge for its own sake.

But in this new stage they preserve the bias of their original
utilitarian function, and carry this mark with them everywhere, leaving
it upon the fresh tasks which we are fain to make them accomplish.

An inner reform is therefore imperative today, if we are to succeed in
unearthing and sifting, in our perception of nature, under the veinstone
of practical symbolism, the true intuitional content.

This attempt at return to the standpoint of pure contemplation and
disinterested experience is a task very different from the task of
science. It is one thing to regard more and more or less and less
closely with the eyes made for us by utilitarian evolution: it is
another to labour at remaking for ourselves eyes capable of seeing, in
order to see, and not in order to live.

Philosophy understood in this manner--and we shall see more and
more clearly as we go on that there is no other legitimate method of
understanding it--demands from us an almost violent act of reform and
conversion.

The mind must turn round upon itself, invert the habitual direction of
its thought, climb the hill down which its instinct towards action has
carried it, and go to seek experience at its source, "above the critical
bend where it inclines towards our practical use and becomes, properly
speaking, human experience." ("Matter and Memory", page 203.) In short,