nother? how be for others and yet for themselves? how be absent
and present at once? The intellect asks these questions much as we
might ask how anything can both separate and unite things, or how
sounds can grow more alike by continuing to grow more different. If
you already know space sensibly, you can answer the former question by
pointing to any interval in it, long or short; if you know the musical
scale, you can answer the latter by sounding an octave; but then you
must first have the sensible knowledge of these realities. Similarly
Bergson answers the intellectualist conundrums by pointing back to our
various finite sensational experiences and saying, 'Lo, even thus;
even so are these other problems solved livingly.'

When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can
reconstruct it in its wholeness. Out of no amount of discreteness
can you manufacture the concrete. But place yourself at a bound, or
_d'emblee_, as M. Bergson says, inside of the living, moving, active
thickness of the real, and all the abstractions and distinctions
are given into your hand: you can now make the intellectualist
substitutions to your heart's content. Install yourself in phenomenal
movement, for example, and velocity, succession, dates, positions, and
innumerable other things are given you in the bargain. But with only
an abstract succession of dates and positions you can never patch up
movement itself. It slips through their intervals and is lost.

So it is with every concrete thing, however complicated. Our
intellectual handling of it is a retrospective patchwork, a
post-mortem dissection, and can follow any order we find most
expedient. We can make the thing seem self-contradictory whenever
we wish to. But place yourself at the point of view of the thing's
interior _doing_, and all these back-looking and conflicting
conceptions lie harmoniously in your hand. Get at the expanding centre
of a human character, the _elan vital_ of a man, as Bergson calls it,
by living sympathy, and at a stroke you see how it makes those who see
it from without interpret it in such diverse ways. It is something
that breaks into both honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice,
stupidity and insight, at the touch of varying circumstances, and you
feel exactly why and how it does this, and never seek to identify
it stably with any of these single abstractions. Only your
intellectualist does that,--and you now also feel why _he_ must do it
t