This is all very esoteric, and my own understanding of it is most likely misunderstanding.  So I speak here only by way of brief reminder to those who know.  For the rest of us it is enough to recognize this fact, that altho by means of concepts cut out from the sensible flux of the past, we can re-descend upon the future flux and, making another cut, say what particular thing is likely to be found there; and that altho in this sense concepts give us knowledge, and may be said to have some theoretic value (especially when the particular thing foretold is one in which we take no present practical interest); yet in the deeper sense of giving insight they have no theoretic value, for they quite fail to connect us with the inner life of the flux, or with the causes that govern its direction.  Instead of being interpreters of reality, concepts negate the inwardness of reality altogether.  They make the whole notion of a causal influence between finite things incomprehensible.  No real activities and indeed no real connexions of any kind can obtain if we follow the conceptual logic; for to be distinguishable, according to what I call intellectualism, is to be incapable of connexion.  The work begun by Zeno, and continued by Hume, Kant, Herbart, Hegel, and Bradley, does not stop till sensible reality lies entirely disintegrated at the feet of ‘reason.’

Of the ‘absolute’ reality which reason proposes to substitute for sensible reality I shall have more to say presently.  Meanwhile you see what Professor Bergson means by insisting that the function of the intellect is practical rather than theoretical.  Sensible reality is too concrete to be entirely manageable—­look at the narrow range of it which is all that any animal, living in it exclusively as he does, is able to compass.  To get from one point in it to another we have to plough or wade through the whole intolerable interval.  No detail is spared us; it is as bad as the barbed-wire complications at Port Arthur, and we grow old and die in the process.  But with our faculty of abstracting and fixing concepts we are there in a second, almost as if we controlled a fourth dimension, skipping the intermediaries as by a divine winged power, and getting at the exact point we require without entanglement with any context.  What we do in fact is to harness up reality in our conceptual systems in order to drive it the better.  This process is practical because all the termini to which we drive are particular termini, even when they are facts of the mental order.  But the sciences in which the conceptual method chiefly celebrates its triumphs are those of space and matter, where the transformations of external things are dealt with.  To deal with moral facts conceptually, we have first to transform them, substitute brain-diagrams or physical metaphors, treat ideas as atoms, interests as mechanical forces, our conscious ‘selves’ as ‘streams,’ and the like.  Paradoxical effect! as Bergson well remarks, if our intellectual