If we really could reverse this effort and concentrate upon knowing the whole field of past and present as fully as possible, instead of classifying it, which involves selecting part of the field and ignoring the rest, it is theoretically conceivable that we might succeed in knowing directly the whole of the process of duration which constitutes the individual mental life of each one of us. And it is not even certain that our knowledge must necessarily be confined within the limits of what we have called our individual mental life. Particular facts, as we have seen, are not really distinct parts of a single individual mental life: the notion of separateness applies only to abstractions and it is only because we are much more pre-occupied with abstractions than with actual facts that we come to suppose that facts can ever really be separate from one another. When we shake off our common sense assumptions and examine the actual facts which we know directly we find that they form a process and not a logical series of distinct facts one after the other. Now on analogy it seems possible that what we call individual mental lives are, to the wider process which contains and constitutes the whole of reality, as particular facts are to the whole process which constitutes each individual mental life. The whole of reality may contain individual lives as these contain particular facts, not as separate distinct units in logical relations, but as a process in which the line of demarcation between “the parts” (if we must speak of “parts”) is not clear cut. If this analogy holds then it is impossible in advance to set any limits to the field of direct knowledge which it may be in our power to secure by reversing our usual mental attitude and devoting our energies simply to knowing, instead of to classifying and explaining. But without going beyond the limits of our individual experience, and even without coming to know directly the whole field of past and present fact which that experience contains, it is still a considerable gain to our direct knowledge if we realize what false assumptions our preoccupation with classification leads us to make even about the very limited facts to which our direct knowledge is ordinarily confined. We then realize that, besides being considerably less than what we probably have it in our power to know, these few facts that we do know are themselves by no means what we commonly suppose them to be. The two fundamental errors into which common sense leads us about the facts are the assumptions that they have the logical form, that is contain mutually exclusive parts in external relations, and that these parts can be repeated over and over again. These two false assumptions are summed up in the common sense view that the fact which we know directly actually consists of events, things, states, qualities. Bergson tells us that when once we have realized that this is not the case we have begun to be philosophers.