What is true here of successive states must also be true of simultaneous characters.  They also overlap each other with their being.  My present field of consciousness is a centre surrounded by a fringe that shades insensibly into a subconscious more.  I use three separate terms here to describe, this fact; but I might as well use three hundred, for the fact is all shades and no boundaries.  Which part of it properly is in my consciousness, which out?  If I name what is out, it already has come in.  The centre works in one way while the margins work in another, and presently overpower the centre and are central themselves.  What we conceptually identify ourselves with and say we are thinking of at any time is the centre; but our full self is the whole field, with all those indefinitely radiating subconscious possibilities of increase that we can only feel without conceiving, and can hardly begin to analyze.  The collective and the distributive ways of being coexist here, for each part functions distinctly, makes connexion with its own peculiar region in the still wider rest of experience and tends to draw us into that line, and yet the whole is somehow felt as one pulse of our life,—­not conceived so, but felt so.

In principle, then, as I said, intellectualism’s edge is broken; it can only approximate to reality, and its logic is inapplicable to our inner life, which spurns its vetoes and mocks at its impossibilities.  Every bit of us at every moment is part and parcel of a wider self, it quivers along various radii like the wind-rose on a compass, and the actual in it is continuously one with possibles not yet in our present sight.[8] And just as we are co-conscious with our own momentary margin, may not we ourselves form the margin of some more really central self in things which is co-conscious with the whole of us?  May not you and I be confluent in a higher consciousness, and confluently active there, tho we now know it not?

I am tiring myself and you, I know, by vainly seeking to describe by concepts and words what I say at the same time exceeds either conceptualization or verbalization.  As long as one continues talking, intellectualism remains in undisturbed possession of the field.  The return to life can’t come about by talking.  It is an act; to make you return to life, I must set an example for your imitation, I must deafen you to talk, or to the importance of talk, by showing you, as Bergson does, that the concepts we talk with are made for purposes of practice and not for purposes of insight.  Or I must point, point to the mere that of life, and you by inner sympathy must fill out the what for yourselves.  The minds of some of you, I know, will absolutely refuse to do so, refuse to think in non-conceptualized terms.  I myself absolutely refused to do so for years together, even after I knew that the denial of manyness-in-oneness by intellectualism must be false,