On the assumption which Bergson makes of a much wider field of direct knowledge than that which contains what we are accustomed to regard as the actual facts which we know directly, Bergson’s problem becomes how to account for these facts being so much less than the whole field which we might have expected to have known. The answer, according to him, is to be found in our practical need of being prepared in advance for what is to come, at whatever sacrifice of direct knowledge of past and present facts. For practical purposes it is essential to use present and past facts as signs of what is coming so that we may be ready for it. To this end it is far more important to know the general laws according to which facts occur than to experience the facts themselves in their fullness. Our intellectual habits which prompt us to set to work at once in every unfamiliar situation to analyse and classify it fit us for discovering these laws: in so far as we are intellectual we incline to regard facts mainly as material for arriving at descriptions which themselves form the material out of which, by a further intellectual effort, explanations are framed in terms of general laws, which we need to know if we are to be ready for what is going to happen. Now these laws are general laws applying to whole classes of facts of one kind, or another. Facts, therefore, only form material for discovering laws in so far as they can be classified into kinds. The first step in classifying a fact is called analysis and consists in discovering common qualities which the fact possesses. According to Bergson the discovery of common qualities in a fact consists simply in learning to overlook everything in that fact except the respects in which it can be said to be of the same kind, and so to belong to the same class, as other facts. Far from adding to our direct knowledge, as common sense supposes, he holds that analysis consists in shutting our eyes to the individuality of facts in order to dwell only upon what they have in common with one another. Starting, then, from the wider field of knowledge which he assumes Bergson explains how we reach the limited facts, which are all that we ordinarily know, by saying that these facts are arrived at by selection out of this much wider field. It is not the disinterested love of knowledge that determines how much we shall actually attend to: our selection from the whole field of what facts we will attend to is determined by the pressing need of being prepared in advance for the facts which are to come. We attend only to so much of the whole of what is, in some sense, directly known to us as will be useful for framing the general laws which enable us to prepare in advance for what is coming. This practical utility explains why analysis and classification seem to us to be the obvious way of dealing with what we know.