This qualitative flavour, however, is, of course, not a quality in the logical sense which implies distinctness and externality of relations. Facts have logical qualities only if they are taken in abstraction isolated from their context. This is not how fact actually occurs. Every fact occurs in the course of the duration of some mental life which itself changes as a process of duration and not as a logical series. The mental life of an individual is, as it were, a comprehensive fact which embraces all the facts directly known to that individual in a single process of creative duration. Facts are to the mental life of an individual what bare sensation is to the actual fact directly known in perception: facts are, as it were, the matter of mental life. Imagine a fact directly known, such as we have described in discussing sensible perception, lasting on and on, perpetually taking up new bare sensations and complicating them with meaning which consists of all the past which it already contains so as to make out of this combination of past and present fresh fact, that will give you some idea of the way in which Bergson thinks that mental life is created out of matter by memory. Only this description is still unsatisfactory because it is obliged to speak of what is created either in the plural or in the singular and so fails to convey either the differentiation contained in mental life or else its unbroken continuity as all one fact progressively modified by absorbing more and more matter. If Bergson’s account of the way in which memory works is true there is a sense in which the whole past of every individual is preserved in memory and all unites with any present bare sensation to constitute the fact directly known to him at any given moment. If the continuity of duration is really unbroken there is no possibility of any of the past being lost. This is why Bergson maintains that the whole of our past is contained in our virtual knowledge: what he means by our virtual knowledge is simply everything which enters into the process of duration which constitutes our whole mental life. Besides our whole past this virtual knowledge must also contain much more of present bare sensation than we are usually aware of.