Having stripped the veil of common sense assumptions from what we know directly our task will then be to hold this direct knowledge before us so as to know as much as possible. The act by which we know directly is the very same act by which we perceive and remember; these are all simply acts of synthesis, efforts to turn matter into creative duration. What we have to do is, as it were, to make a big act of perception to embrace as wild a field as possible of past and present as a single fact directly known. This act of synthesis Bergson calls “intuition.” Intuition may be described as turning past and present into fact directly known by transforming it from mere matter into a creative process of duration: but, of course, actually, there is not, first matter, then an act of intuition which synthesises it, and finally a fact in duration, there is simply the duration, and the matter and the act of intuition are only abstractions by which we describe and explain it. The effort of intuition is the reversal of the intellectual effort to abstract and explain which is our usual way of treating facts, and these two ways of attending are incompatible and cannot both be carried on together. Intuition, (or, to give it a more familiar name, direct knowledge,) reveals fact: intellectual attention analyses and classifies this fact in order to explain it in general terms, that is to explain it by substituting abstractions for the actual fact. Obviously we cannot perform acts of analysis without some fact to serve as material: analysis uses the facts supplied by direct knowledge as its material. Bergson maintains that in so doing it limits and distorts these facts and he says that if we are looking for speculative knowledge we must go back to direct knowledge, or, as he calls it, intuition. But bare acquaintance is in-communicable, moreover it requires a great effort to maintain it. In order to communicate it and retain the power of getting the facts back again after we have relaxed our grip on them we are obliged, once we have obtained the fullest direct knowledge of which we are capable, to apply the intellectual method to the fact thus revealed and attempt to describe it in general terms. Now the directly known forms a creative duration whose special characteristics are that it is non-logical, (i.e., is not made up of distinct mutually exclusive terms united by external relations) and does not contain parts which can be repeated over and over, while on the other hand the terms which we have to substitute for it if we want to describe it only stand for repetitions and have the logical form. It looks, therefore, as if our descriptions could not, as they stand, be very successful in conveying to others the fact known to us directly, or in recalling it to ourselves.