is to guide us in the practical adaptation of our expectancies and
activities?

One can easily get into a verbal mess at this point, and my own
experience with pragmatism' makes me shrink from the dangers that lie
in the word 'practical,' and far rather than stand out against you for
that word, I am quite willing to part company with Professor Bergson,
and to ascribe a primarily theoretical function to our intellect,
provided you on your part then agree to discriminate 'theoretic' or
scientific knowledge from the deeper 'speculative' knowledge aspired
to by most philosophers, and concede that theoretic knowledge,
which is knowledge _about_ things, as distinguished from living or
sympathetic acquaintance with them, touches only the outer surface of
reality. The surface which theoretic knowledge taken in this sense
covers may indeed be enormous in extent; it may dot the whole diameter
of space and time with its conceptual creations; but it does not
penetrate a millimeter into the solid dimension. That inner dimension
of reality is occupied by the _activities_ that keep it going, but the
intellect, speaking through Hume, Kant & Co., finds itself obliged to
deny, and persists in denying, that activities have any intelligible
existence. What exists for _thought_, we are told, is at most the
results that we illusorily ascribe to such activities, strung along
the surfaces of space and time by _regeln der verknuepfung_, laws of
nature which state only coexistences and successions.[1]

Thought deals thus solely with surfaces. It can name the thickness
of reality, but it cannot fathom it, and its insufficiency here is
essential and permanent, not temporary.

The only way in which to apprehend reality's thickness is either to
experience it directly by being a part of reality one's self, or to
evoke it in imagination by sympathetically divining some one else's
inner life. But what we thus immediately experience or concretely
divine is very limited in duration, whereas abstractly we are able to
conceive eternities. Could we feel a million years concretely as we
now feel a passing minute, we should have very little employment for
our conceptual faculty. We should know the whole period fully at every
moment of its passage, whereas we must now construct it laboriously by
means of concepts which we project. Direct acquaintance and conceptual
knowledge are thus complementary of each other; each remedies the
other's defects. If what w