CONTINUITY OF BERGSON's THOUGHT 187 



this province, we find that it is that pure duration which is the essence 

 of the soul itself, and of conscious life in general. 



In all the problems of materiality, science is the final arbiter, 

 and this is precisely because matter, in the sense in which science 

 uses that word, is itself the creature and product of the intellect 

 of which science makes use. When the will is free, and all the experi- 

 ence that we have endured crowds itself into the present to act upon 

 the environment, there is no thought of intellect; but just in propor- 

 tion as the will is weakened, the detension is accompanied by an 

 increased grip upon extension, and in this mood it is that we find 

 mathematics and physics the most natural expression of our experience. 



Life itself comes before intellect; all the essentials of human experi- 

 ence were established before mathematics and science were dreamed 

 of. "The more we succeed in making ourselves conscious of our prog- 

 ress in pure duration, the more we feel the different parts of our being 

 enter into each other." But when we let ourselves go, we dream, we 

 five in mere sensation, and the material aspect of experience over- 

 rides the psychic. It is just here that science is at its best and comes 

 to its own. 



The fundamental error of Kant was to throw "time" to the sci- 

 entists along with "space," and "cause," and other "categories," 

 to which science is rightly entitled. It is by an inversion of the forward 

 movement of real time, that we slip back by degrees into spatiality and 

 the geometrical point of view. 



The whole end of intellect is to spatialize experience so as to 

 handle it in analytic schemata. Intellect is capable of reading into 

 experience an endless complexity, and then of finding in that same 

 experience the complexity it has ascribed thereto. To make this 

 clear, think of a poet's verses : the poet as a creator is concerned with 

 a simple effort to express his story, and is utterly unconscious of the 

 phrases and syllables and letters he writes. And yet the cold, 

 passionless mood of inattention so lifeless and so far from the real 

 nature of poetry will with perfect correctness discover all these 

 elements in the poem. But poetry is not of this nature. And no more 



