The anti-intellectualist doctrine, however, that data of consciousness cannot be understood, conceptualized, defined, or even named--cannot, in short, be objectified--without contradiction is as important for the problem of knowledge as it is for the problem of freedom. Professor Perry’s analysis of immediatism[145] shows the misunderstanding of what it is to conceptualize, which underlies such a doctrine. The anti-intellectualist idea seems to be that the concept is static, and common to more than one consciousness, and universal in its denotation, and sharply discrete; and that for these reasons it could not correspond to what is fluid and private and uniquely particular and continuous. It is evidently the “copy theory” of knowledge, which unconsciously determines this criticism of the concept. Concepts are invalid, applied to life, _because they are not like living objects_! “You cannot make continuous being out of discontinuities,” is James’s criticism.[146] And Bergson’s: “Instead of a flux of fleeting shades merging into each other [intellect] perceives distinct and, so to speak, _solid_ colors, set side by side like the beads of a necklace.”[147] But, as Perry shows, to conceptualize is nothing like this procedure. Conception is _substitution_ of one object of immediate consciousness which is conveniently abstract, for another object which is, in the circumstances of the conceiving, inconvenient in its concrete fulness. All that is necessary in order that this substitutional mode of consciousness should be valid and true knowledge of the object so symbolized, is that the substitute should _mean_ that object. And that it can and does mean it when the object is a subjective state is no more than the fact that, on Bergson’s own showing, such states are symbolized. For to mean is essentially to symbolize. Certainly no one concept is a rounded-out exhaustive awareness, so to speak, of the symbolized object. But this is no more than to say that conceiving is a selective and eliminating mode of consciousness--which does not distinguish it from any other mode, the most immediate and intuitive possible state of genuine significant consciousness being essentially as much an elimination as a positing.