The search for facts is then the first necessary moment of all philosophy. But common thought comes before us at the outset as a piece of very composite alluvial ground. It is a beginning of positive science, and also a residue of all philosophical opinions which have had some vogue. That, however, is not its primary basis. Primum vivere, deinde philosophari, says the proverb. In certain respects, "speculation is a luxury, whilst action is a necessity." ("Creative Evolution", page 47.) But "life requires us to apprehend things in the relation they have to our needs." ("Laughter", page 154.) Hence comes the fundamental utilitarianism of common-sense. Therefore if we wish to define it in itself and for itself, and no longer as a first approximation of such and such a system of metaphysics, it appears to us no longer as rudimentary science and philosophy, but as an organisation of thought in view of practical life. Thus it is that outside all speculative opinion it is effectively lived by all. Its proper language, we may say, is the language of customary perception and mechanical fabrication, therefore a language relative to action, made to express action, modelled upon action, translating things by the relations they maintain to our action; I mean our corporal and synthetic action, which very evidently implies thought, since it is a question of the action of a reasonable being, but which thus contains a thought which is itself eminently practical. However, we are here regarding common-sense considered as a source of fact. Its utilitarianism then becomes a kind of spontaneous metaphysics from which we must detach ourselves. But is it not the very task of positive science to execute this work of purification? Nothing of the kind, despite appearances and despite intentions. Let us examine more closely. The general categories of common thought, according to Mr Bergson, ("Philosophic Intuition" in the "Metaphysical and Moral Review", November 1911, page 825.) remain those of science; the main roads traced by our senses through the continuity of reality are still those along which science will pass; perception is an infant science and science an adult perception; so much so that customary knowledge and scientific knowledge, both of them destined to prepare our action upon things, are of necessity two visions of the same kind, though of unequal precision and reach. It does not follow that science does not practise a certain disinterestedness as far as immediate mechanical utility is concerned; it does not follow that it has no value as knowledge. But it does not set itself genuinely free from the habits contracted in common experience, and to inform its research it preserves the postulates of common-sense; so that it always grasps things by their "actable" side, by their point of contact with our faculty for action, under the forms by which we handle them conceptually or practically, and all it attains