mate class, having regard to
advantageous employment or to everyday language. Then, and only then,
we find our pigeon-holes all ready-made; and the same parcel of reagents
meets all cases. A universal catechism is here in existence to meet
every research; its different clauses define so many unshifting points
of view, from which we regard each object, and our study is subsequently
limited to applying a kind of nomenclature to the preconstructed frames.

Once again the philosopher has to proceed in exactly the opposite
direction. He has not to confine himself to ready-made business
concepts, of the ordinary kind, suits cut to an average model, which fit
nobody because they almost fit everybody; but he has to work to measure,
incessantly renew his plant, continually recreate his mind, and meet
each new problem with a fresh adaptive effort. He must not go from
concepts to things, as if each of them were only the cutting-point
of several concurrent generalities, an ideal centre of intersecting
abstractions; on the contrary, he must go from things to concepts,
incessantly creating new thoughts, and incessantly recasting the old.

There could be no solution of the problem in a more or less ingenious
mosaic or tessellation of rigid concepts, pre-existing to be employed.
We need plastic fluid, supple and living concepts, capable of being
continually modelled on reality, of delicately following its infinite
curves. The philosopher's task is then to create concepts much more than
to combine them. And each of the concepts he creates must remain open
and adjustable, ready for the necessary renewal and adaptation, like
a method or a programme: it must be the arrow pointing to a path which
descends from intuition to language, not a boundary marking a terminus.
In this way only does philosophy remain what it ought to be: the
examination into the consciousness of the human mind, the effort towards
enlargement and depth which it attempts unremittingly, in order to
advance beyond its present intellectual condition.

Do you want an example? I will take that of human personality. The
ego is one; the ego is many: no one contests this double formula. But
everything admits of it; and what is its lesson to us? Observe what is
bound to happen to the two concepts of unity and multiplicity, by
the mere fact that we take them for general frames independent of the
reality contained, for detached language admitting empty and blank
definition, alwa