I subjoin here a few remarks destined to disarm some possible critics of Professor Bergson, who, to defend himself against misunderstandings of his meaning, ought to amplify and more fully explain his statement that concepts have a practical but not a theoretical use.  Understood in one way, the thesis sounds indefensible, for by concepts we certainly increase our knowledge about things, and that seems a theoretical achievement, whatever practical achievements may follow in its train.  Indeed, M. Bergson might seem to be easily refutable out of his own mouth.  His philosophy pretends, if anything, to give a better insight into truth than rationalistic philosophies give:  yet what is it in itself if not a conceptual system?  Does its author not reason by concepts exclusively in his very attempt to show that they can give no insight?

To this particular objection, at any rate, it is easy to reply.  In using concepts of his own to discredit the theoretic claims of concepts generally, Bergson does not contradict, but on the contrary emphatically illustrates his own view of their practical role, for they serve in his hands only to ‘orient’ us, to show us to what quarter we must practically turn if we wish to gain that completer insight into reality which he denies that they can give.  He directs our hopes away from them and towards the despised sensible flux. What he reaches by their means is thus only a new practical attitude.  He but restores, against the vetoes of intellectualist philosophy, our naturally cordial relations with sensible experience and common sense.  This service is surely only practical; but it is a service for which we may be almost immeasurably grateful.  To trust our senses again with a good philosophic conscience!—­who ever conferred on us so valuable a freedom before?

By making certain distinctions and additions it seems easy to meet the other counts of the indictment.  Concepts are realities of a new order, with particular relations between them.  These relations are just as much directly perceived, when we compare our various concepts, as the distance between two sense-objects is perceived when we look at it.  Conception is an operation which gives us material for new acts of perception, then; and when the results of these are written down, we get those bodies of ‘mental truth’ (as Locke called it) known as mathematics, logic, and a priori metaphysics.  To know all this truth is a theoretic achievement, indeed, but it is a narrow one; for the relations between conceptual objects as such are only the static ones of bare comparison, as difference or sameness, congruity or contradiction, inclusion or exclusion.  Nothing happens in the realm of concepts; relations there are ‘eternal’ only.  The theoretic gain fails so far, therefore, to touch even the outer hem of the real world, the world of causal and dynamic relations, of activity and history.  To gain insight into all that moving life, Bergson is right in turning us away from conception and towards perception.