He says something like this.  We find as a matter of practice that certain problems when presented to the intellect are difficult and even impossible to solve, whereas when presented to our experience of life, their solution is so obvious that they cease to be problems.  Thus, the unaided intellect might be puzzled to say how sounds can grow more alike by continuing to grow more different.  Yet a child can answer the question by sounding an octave on the piano.  But this solution is reached by having sensible knowledge of the reality and not by logical argument.  Bergson’s view, therefore, is that the intellect has been evolved for practical purposes, to deal in a certain way with material things by cutting up into little bits what is an undivided flow of movement, and by looking at these little bits side by side.  This, though necessary for practical life, is utterly misleading when we assume that the “points” thus singled out by the intellect represent the “thickness” of reality.  Reality is fluidity, and we cannot dip up its substance with the intellect which deals with surfaces, even as we cannot dip up water with a net, however finely meshed.  Reality is movement, and movement is the one thing we are unable intellectually to realise.

In order to grasp reality we must use the faculty of contact or immediate feeling, or, as Bergson calls it, intuition.  Intuition is a different order of knowledge, it is moulded on the very form of life, and it enables us to enter into life, to be one with it, to live it.  It is “a direction of movement:  and, although capable of infinite development, is simplicity itself.”  This is the mystic art, which in its early stages is a direction of movement, an alteration of the quality and intensity of the self.  So Bergson, making use of and applying the whole range of modern psychology and biology, tells us that we must develop intuition as a philosophical instrument if we are to gain any knowledge of things in themselves; and he is thus re-echoing in modern terms what was long ago stated by Plotinus when he said—­

Knowledge has three degrees—­opinion, science, illumination.  The means or instrument of the first is sense, of the second dialectic, of the third intuition.  To the last I subordinate reason.  It is absolute knowledge founded on the identity of the mind knowing with the object known. (Letter to Flaccus.)

We have discovered that sense knowledge, however acute, has to be corrected by the intellect, which tells us that the sun does not go round the earth, although it appears to our observation to do this.  So possibly, in turn, the intellect, however acute, may have to be corrected by intuition, and the impotence of brain knowledge in dealing with the problem of life is leading slowly to the perception that to know in its true sense is not an intellectual process at all.