[388] “I look and I think I see, I listen and I think I hear, I examine myself and I think I am reading the very depths of my heart. But what I see and hear of the outer world is purely and simply a _selection made by my senses to serve as a light to my conduct_; what I know of myself is what comes to the surface, what participates in my actions. My senses and my consciousness, therefore, give me no more than a _practical simplification_ of reality in the vision they furnish me of myself and of things, the differences that are useless to man are obliterated, the resemblances that are useful to him are emphasised; ways are traced out for me in advance along which my activity is to travel. These ways are the ways which all mankind has trod before me. Things have been classified with a view to the use I can derive from them” (_Laughter_, p. 151). “Life implies the acceptance of the _utilitarian_ side of things in order to respond to them by appropriate reactions; all other impressions must be dimmed or else reach us vague and blurred” (_ibid._ p. 131). These last words give us a glimpse of a very important part of Bergson’s teaching--his idea, namely (Voltaire has it in his _Micromégas_), that “matter” is greater than our perceptions, that our perceptions reveal to us only those aspects of the physical universe with which we are practically concerned. [389] Some years ago psychologists began to distinguish a “structural” from a “functional” psychology, meaning by the former what is otherwise called Psycho-Physics or (to some extent) Experimental Psychology. [390] Cf. “At first sight it may seem prudent to leave the consideration of facts to positive science, to let physics and chemistry busy themselves with matter, the biological and psychological sciences _with life_. The task of the philosopher is then clearly defined. _He takes facts and laws_ from the _scientist’s hand_, and whether he tries to go beyond them in order to reach their deeper causes, or whether he thinks it impossible to go further, and even proves it by the analysis of scientific knowledge, in both cases he has for _the facts and relations, handed over by science, the sort of respect that is due to a final verdict_. To this knowledge he adds a critique of the faculty of knowing, and also, if he thinks proper, a metaphysic; but the _matter_ of knowledge he regards as the affair of science, and not of philosophy” (_Creative Evolution_, pp. 204–5). [All this represents only too faithfully what even some of our Neo-Kantians have been saying, and teaching, although there is an error in their whole procedure here.] [391] Schopenhauer’s phrase. See my book upon _Schopenhauer’s System_.