e care most about be the synoptic treatment
of phenomena, the vision of the far and the gathering of the scattered
like, we must follow the conceptual method. But if, as metaphysicians,
we are more curious about the inner nature of reality or about what
really makes it go, we must turn our backs upon our winged concepts
altogether, and bury ourselves in the thickness of those passing
moments over the surface of which they fly, and on particular points
of which they occasionally rest and perch.

Professor Bergson thus inverts the traditional platonic doctrine
absolutely. Instead of intellectual knowledge being the profounder,
he calls it the more superficial. Instead of being the only adequate
knowledge, it is grossly inadequate, and its only superiority is the
practical one of enabling us to make short cuts through experience
and thereby to save time. The one thing it cannot do is to reveal the
nature of things--which last remark, if not clear already, will become
clearer as I proceed. Dive back into the flux itself, then, Bergson
tells us, if you wish to _know_ reality, that flux which Platonism, in
its strange belief that only the immutable is excellent, has always
spurned; turn your face toward sensation, that flesh-bound thing which
rationalism has always loaded with abuse.--This, you see, is exactly
the opposite remedy from that of looking forward into the absolute,
which our idealistic contemporaries prescribe. It violates our mental
habits, being a kind of passive and receptive listening quite contrary
to that effort to react noisily and verbally on everything, which is
our usual intellectual pose.

What, then, are the peculiar features in the perceptual flux which the
conceptual translation so fatally leaves out?

The essence of life is its continuously changing character; but our
concepts are all discontinuous and fixed, and the only mode of making
them coincide with life is by arbitrarily supposing positions of
arrest therein. With such arrests our concepts may be made congruent.
But these concepts are not _parts_ of reality, not real positions
taken by it, but _suppositions_ rather, notes taken by ourselves, and
you can no more dip up the substance of reality with them than you can
dip up water with a net, however finely meshed.

When we conceptualize, we cut out and fix, and exclude everything
but what we have fixed. A concept means a _that-and-no-other_.
Conceptually, time excludes space; motion and res