continued
by Hume, Kant, Herbart, Hegel, and Bradley, does not stop till
sensible reality lies entirely disintegrated at the feet of 'reason.'

Of the 'absolute' reality which reason proposes to substitute for
sensible reality I shall have more to say presently. Meanwhile you see
what Professor Bergson means by insisting that the function of the
intellect is practical rather than theoretical. Sensible reality is
too concrete to be entirely manageable--look at the narrow range of it
which is all that any animal, living in it exclusively as he does, is
able to compass. To get from one point in it to another we have to
plough or wade through the whole intolerable interval. No detail is
spared us; it is as bad as the barbed-wire complications at Port
Arthur, and we grow old and die in the process. But with our faculty
of abstracting and fixing concepts we are there in a second, almost as
if we controlled a fourth dimension, skipping the intermediaries as
by a divine winged power, and getting at the exact point we require
without entanglement with any context. What we do in fact is to
_harness up_ reality in our conceptual systems in order to drive it
the better. This process is practical because all the termini to which
we drive are _particular_ termini, even when they are facts of the
mental order. But the sciences in which the conceptual method chiefly
celebrates its triumphs are those of space and matter, where the
transformations of external things are dealt with. To deal with moral
facts conceptually, we have first to transform them, substitute
brain-diagrams or physical metaphors, treat ideas as atoms, interests
as mechanical forces, our conscious 'selves' as 'streams,' and the
like. Paradoxical effect! as Bergson well remarks, if our intellectual
life were not practical but destined to reveal the inner natures.
One would then suppose that it would find itself most at home in the
domain of its own intellectual realities. But it is precisely there
that it finds itself at the end of its tether. We know the inner
movements of our spirit only perceptually. We feel them live in us,
but can give no distinct account of their elements, nor definitely
predict their future; while things that lie along the world of space,
things of the sort that we literally _handle_, are what our intellects
cope with most successfully. Does not this confirm us in the view that
the original and still surviving function of our intellectual life