In another place Bergson says:  “When a poet reads me his verses, I can interest myself enough in him to enter into his thought, put myself into his feelings, live over again the simple state he has broken into phrases and words.  I sympathize then with his inspiration, I follow it with a continuous movement which is, like the inspiration itself, an undivided act.”  If this sympathy could extend its object and so reflect upon itself, it would give us the key to vital operations in the same way as Intelligence, developed and corrected, introduces us into Matter.  Intelligence, by the intermediary of science, which is its work, tells more and more completely the secret of physical operations; of Life it gives and pretends only to give an expression in terms of inertia.  We should be led into the very interior of Life by Intuition, that is, by Instinct become disinterested, conscious of itself, capable of reflecting on its object and enlarging it indefinitely.

In proclaiming the gospel of Intuition, Bergson’s main point is to show that man is capable of an experience and a knowledge deeper than that which the Intellect can possibly give.  “At intervals a soul arises which seems to triumph... by dint of simplicity—­the soul of an artist or a poet, which, remaining near its source, reconciles, in a harmony appreciable by the heart, terms irreconcilable by the intelligence” [Footnote:  From the address on Ravaisson, delivered before the Academie des Sciences morales et politiques 1904.] His point of view is here akin to that of an earlier French thinker, Pascal, who said:  “The heart hath reasons that the reason cannot know.”  The Intellect is, by its nature, the fabricator of concepts, and concepts are, in Bergson’s view, mischievous.  They are static, they leave out the flux of things, they omit too much of experience, they are framed at an expensive cost, the expense of vital contact with Life itself.  Of course he admits a certain value in concepts, but he refuses to admit that they help us at all to grasp reality in its flux.  “Metaphysics must transcend concepts in order to reach Intuition.  Certainly concepts are necessary to it, for all the other sciences work, as a rule, with concepts, and Metaphysics cannot dispense with the other sciences.  But it is only truly itself when it goes beyond the concept, or at least when it frees itself from rigid and ready-made concepts, in order to create a kind very different from those which we habitually use; I mean supple, mobile, and almost fluid representations, always ready to mould themselves on the fleeting forms of Intuition.” [Footnote:  An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 18.]

The true instrument of Metaphysics is intuition.  We can only grasp ourselves, Bergson points out, by a metaphysical Intuition, for the soul eludes thought; we cannot place it among concepts or in a category.  Intuition, however, reveals to us Real Time (la duree) and our real selves, changing and living as free personalities in a Time which, as it advances, creates.