Even Bergson, however, does not get away from the distinction between appearance and reality. The fact is for him the reality, the abstraction the appearance. But then the fact which is the reality is not the fact which we ordinarily suppose ourselves to know, the little fragment which constitutes “our experience at the present moment.” This is itself an abstraction from the vastly wider fact of our virtual knowledge, and it is this wider field of knowledge which is the reality. Abstraction involves falsification and so the little fragment of fact to which our attention is usually confined is not, as it stands, reality: it is appearance. We should only know reality as it is if we could replace this fragment in its proper context in the whole field of virtual knowledge (or reality) where it belongs. What we should then know would not be appearance but reality itself. It is at this knowledge, according to Bergson, that philosophy aims. Philosophy is a reversal of our ordinary intellectual habits: ordinarily thought progresses from abstraction to abstraction steadily getting further from concrete facts: according to Bergson the task of philosophy should be to put abstractions back again into their context so as to obtain the fullest possible knowledge of actual fact. In order to describe and explain this fact, however, we have to make use of abstractions. Bergson describes the fact known directly by sensible perception as a contraction of a period of the duration of matter in which the “past” states of matter are preserved along with the “present” and form a single whole with it. It is memory which makes this difference between matter and the actual facts by preserving “past” matter and combining it with “the present.” A single perceived fact, however, does not contain memories as distinct from present material: the distinction between “past” and “present” does not hold inside facts whose duration forms a creative whole and not a logical series. Of course it is incorrect to describe facts as “containing past and present matter,” but, as we have often pointed out, misleading though their logical implications are, we are obliged to replace facts by abstractions when we want to describe them.