The effort of intuition is the reversal of the intellectual effort to abstract and explain which is our usual way of treating facts, and these two ways of attending are incompatible and cannot both be carried on together. Intuition, (or, to give it a more familiar name, direct knowledge,) reveals fact: intellectual attention analyses and classifies this fact in order to explain it in general terms, that is to explain it by substituting abstractions for the actual fact. Obviously we cannot perform acts of analysis without some fact to serve as material: analysis uses the facts supplied by direct knowledge as its material. Bergson maintains that in so doing it limits and distorts these facts and he says that if we are looking for speculative knowledge we must go back to direct knowledge, or, as he calls it, intuition.
But bare acquaintance is in-communicable, moreover it requires a great effort to maintain it. In order to communicate it and retain the power of getting the facts back again after we have relaxed our grip on them we are obliged, once we have obtained the fullest direct knowledge of which we are capable, to apply the intellectual method to the fact thus revealed and attempt to describe it in general terms.
Now the directly known forms a creative duration whose special characteristics are that it is non-logical, (i.e., is not made up of distinct mutually exclusive terms united by external relations) and does not contain parts which can be repeated over and over, while on the other hand the terms which we have to substitute for it if we want to describe it only stand for repetitions and have the logical form. It looks, therefore, as if our descriptions could not, as they stand, be very successful in conveying to others the fact known to us directly, or in recalling it to ourselves.
In order that the description substituted by our intellectual activity for the facts which we want to describe may convey these facts it is necessary to perform an act of synthesis on the description analogous to the act of perception which originally created the fact itself out of mere matter. The words used in a description should be to the hearer what mere matter is to the perceiver: in order that matter may be perceived an act of synthesis must be performed by which the matter is turned into fact in duration: similarly in order to gather what a description of a fact means the hearer must take the general terms which are employed not as being distinct and mutually exclusive but as modifying one another and interpenetrating in the way in which the “parts” of a process of creative duration interpenetrate. In the same way by understanding the terms employed synthetically and not intellectually we can use a description to recall any fact which we have once known directly. Thus our knowledge advances by alternate acts of direct acquaintance and analysis.
Philosophy must start from a fresh effort of acquaintance creating, if possible, a fact wider and fuller than the facts which we are content to know for the purposes of everyday life. But analysis is essential if the fact thus directly known is to be conveyed to others and recalled. By analysis the philosopher fixes this wider field in order that he may communicate and recall it. Starting later from the description of some fact obtained by a previous effort of acquaintance, or from several facts obtained at different times, and also from the facts described by others, and using all these descriptions as material, it may be possible, by a fresh effort, to perform acts of acquaintance, (or synthesis) embracing ever wider and wider fields of knowledge. This, according to Bergson, is the way in which philosophical knowledge should be built up, facts, obtained by acts of acquaintance, being translated into descriptions only that these descriptions may again be further synthesised so directing our attention to more and more comprehensive facts.
Inevitably, of course, these facts themselves, being less than all the stream of creative duration to which they belong, will be abstractions, if taken apart from that whole stream, and so distorted. This flaw in what we know even by direct acquaintance can never be wholly remedied short of our succeeding in becoming acquainted with the whole of duration. It is something, however, to be aware of the flaw, even if we cannot wholly remedy it, and the wider the acquaintance the less is the imperfection in the fact known.
The first step, in any case, towards obtaining the wider acquaintance at which philosophy aims consists in making the effort necessary to rid ourselves of the practical preoccupation which gives us our bias towards explaining everything long before we have allowed ourselves time to pay proper attention to it, in order that we may at least get back to such actual facts as we do already know directly. When this has been accomplished (and our intellectual habits are so deeply ingrained that the task is by no means easy) we can then go on to other philosophers’ descriptions of the facts with which their own efforts to widen their direct knowledge have acquainted them and, by synthesising the general terms which they have been obliged to employ, we also may come to know these more comprehensive facts. Unless it is understood synthetically, however, a philosopher’s description of the facts with which he has acquainted himself will be altogether unsatisfactory and misleading. It is in this way that Bergson’s own analysis of the fact which we all know directly into matter and the act of memory by which matter is turned into a creative process should be understood. The matter and the act of memory are both abstractions from the actual fact: he does not mean that over and above the fact there is either any matter or any force or activity called memory nor are these things supposed to be in the actual fact: they are simply abstract terms in which the fact is described.
Bergson tries elsewhere to put the same point by saying that there are two tendencies in reality, one towards space (that is logical form) and the other towards duration, and that the actual fact which we know directly “tends” now towards “space” and now towards duration. The two faculties intellect and intuition are likewise fictions which are not really supposed to exist, distinct from the fact to which they are applied, but are simply abstract notions invented for the sake of description.
Whatever the description by which a philosopher attempts to convey what he has discovered we shall only understand it if we remember that the terms in which the fact is described are not actually parts of the fact itself and can only convey the meaning intended if they are grasped by synthesis and not intellectually understood.