Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/261

 reality as it appears to immediate intuition, but an adaptation of the real to the interests of practice and to the exigencies of social life. Pure intuition, external or internal, is that of an undivided continuity. We break up this continuity into elements laid side by side, which correspond in the one case to distinct words, in the other to independent objects. But, just because we have thus broken the unity of our original intuition, we feel ourselves obliged to establish between the severed terms a bond which can only then be external and superadded. For the living unity, which was one with internal continuity, we substitute the factitious unity of an empty diagram as lifeless as the parts which it holds together. Empiricism and dogmatism are, at bottom, agreed in starting from phenomena so reconstructed; they differ only in that dogmatism attaches itself more particularly to the form and empiricism to the matter. Empiricism, feeling indeed, but feeling vaguely, the artificial character of the relations which unite the terms together, holds to the terms and neglects the relations. Its error is not that it sets too high a value on experience, but that it substitutes for true experience, that experience which arises from the immediate contact of the mind with its object, an experience which is disarticulated and therefore, most probably, disfigured,—at any rate arranged for the greater