As a fact, however, perhaps because this preference between two aspects of the nature of reality depends so obviously on personal bias instead of logical principles, Bergson vacillates, in a hopelessly confused and confusing way, all through his writings, between two conceptions of reality. First, reality is of one nature, namely life, which is pure quality, change, or duration (the four terms are actually synonyms to Bergson), and knowledge of which can be only sympathetic intuition of it, while intellect is merely “an appendage of action,” and not knowledge at all. In the other conception reality is cleft into a dualism more unutterably absolute than that of Descartes. Life is one kind of reality; inert matter is the other. Intuition knows the former; intellect really does _know_ the latter (‘touching something of the absolute’), and knowledge is therefore not intuition only. Although this vacillation confuses issues in every one of Bergson’s books, the first conception is more characteristic, upon the whole, of _Time and Free Will_ and of _Creative Evolution_; the other conception is pretty consistently expounded in _Matter and Memory_. The sphere of intellect is restricted; its cognitive validity is not explicitly denied within this sphere, but only within the domain of life. To be sure, since life exhausts reality, the sphere allotted to intellect is not real, which would seem to imply that intellect fails to know. The validity of intellectual consciousness is thus, in effect, denied equally in either case. The only difference is that the denial is conscious and explicit in one case, more or less unconsciously implied in the other. CHAPTER III THE ANCIENT PREJUDICE AGAINST ANALYSIS