Again it may be said that we combine old concepts into new ones, conceiving thus such realities as the ether, God, souls, or what not, of which our sensible life alone would leave us altogether ignorant.  This surely is an increase of our knowledge, and may well be called a theoretical achievement.  Yet here again Bergson’s criticisms hold good.  Much as conception may tell us about such invisible objects, it sheds no ray of light into their interior.  The completer, indeed, our definitions of ether-waves, atoms, Gods, or souls become, the less instead of the more intelligible do they appear to us.  The learned in such things are consequently beginning more and more to ascribe a solely instrumental value to our concepts of them.  Ether and molecules may be like co-ordinates and averages, only so many crutches by the help of which we practically perform the operation of getting about among our sensible experiences.

We see from these considerations how easily the question of whether the function of concepts is theoretical or practical may grow into a logomachy.  It may be better from this point of view to refuse to recognize the alternative as a sharp one.  The sole thing that is certain in the midst of it all is that Bergson is absolutely right in contending that the whole life of activity and change is inwardly impenetrable to conceptual treatment, and that it opens itself only to sympathetic apprehension at the hands of immediate feeling.  All the whats as well as the thats of reality, relational as well as terminal, are in the end contents of immediate concrete perception.  Yet the remoter unperceived arrangements, temporal, spatial, and logical, of these contents, are also something that we need to know as well for the pleasure of the knowing as for the practical help.  We may call this need of arrangement a theoretic need or a practical need, according as we choose to lay the emphasis; but Bergson is accurately right when he limits conceptual knowledge to arrangement, and when he insists that arrangement is the mere skirt and skin of the whole of what we ought to know.

Note 2, page 266.—­Gaston Rageot, Revue Philosophique, vol. lxiv, p. 85 (July, 1907).

Note 3, page 268.—­I have myself talked in other ways as plausibly as I could, in my Psychology, and talked truly (as I believe) in certain selected cases; but for other cases the natural way invincibly comes back.

LECTURE VII

Note 1, page 278.—­Introduction to Hume, 1874, p. 151.

Note 2, page 279.—­Ibid., pp. 16, 21, 36, et passim.

Note 3, page 279.—­See, inter alia, the chapter on the ’Stream of Thought’ in my own Psychologies; H. Cornelius, Psychologie, 1897, chaps, i and iii; G.H.  Luquet, Idees Generales de Psychologie, 1906, passim.

Note 4, page 280.—­Compare, as to all this, an article by the present writer, entitled ‘A world of pure experience,’ in the Journal of Philosophy, New York, vol. i, pp. 533, 561 (1905).