[418] “So art, whether it be painting or sculpture, poetry or music, has no other object than to brush aside the utilitarian symbols, the conventional and socially accepted generalities, in short, everything that veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to face with reality itself” (_Laughter_, p. 157). It is true that if we read further on this page, and elsewhere in Bergson, we will be able to see that there is for him in art and in the spiritual life a kind of intelligence and knowledge. But it is difficult to work out an expression or a characterisation of this intelligence and this knowledge. “Art,” he says, “is only a more direct vision of reality.” And again: “Realism is in the work when idealism is in the soul, and it is only through ideality that we can resume contact with reality” (_ibid._). [419] It is only fair to Bergson to remember that he is himself aware of the appearances of this dualism in his writings, that he apologises as it were for them, intending the distinction to be, not absolute, but relative. “Let us say at the outset that the distinctions we are going to make will be too sharply drawn, just because we wish to define in instinct what is instinctive, and in intelligence what is intelligent, _whereas all concrete instinct is mingled with intelligence, as all real intelligence is penetrated by instinct. Moreover_ [this is quite an important expression of Bergson’s objection to the old “faculty” psychology], _neither intelligence nor instinct lends itself to rigid definition; they are tendencies and not things_. Also it must not be forgotten that ... we are considering intelligence and _instinct as going out of life_ which deposits them along its course” (_Creative Evolution_, p. 143). [420] He talks in the _Creative Evolution_ of a “real time” and a “pure duration” of a real duration that “bites” into things and leaves on them the mark of its tooth, of a “ceaseless upspringing of something new,” of “our progress in pure duration,” or a “movement which creates at once the intellectuality of mind and the materiality of things” (p. 217). I have no hesitation in saying that all this is unthinkable to me, and that it might indeed be criticised by Rationalism as inconsistent with our highest and most real view of things. [421] He admits himself that “If our analysis is correct, it is consciousness, or rather supra-consciousness that is at the origin of life” (_Creative Evolution_, p. 275).