function to limit, with a view to action, the life of the spirit." It is, in fact, an instrument of choice.
We must now return to the subject of instinct or intuition, as opposed to intellect. It was necessary
first to give some account of duration and memory, since Bergson's theories of duration and
memory are presupposed in this account of intuition. In man, as he now exists, intuition is the
fringe or penumbra of intellect: it has been thrust out of the centre by being less useful in action
than intellect, but it has deeper uses which make it desirable to bring it back into greater
prominence. Bergson wishes to make intellect "turn inwards on itself, and awaken the
potentialities of intuition which still slumber within it." The relation between instinct and intellect
is compared to that between sight and touch. Intellect, we are told, will not give knowledge of
things at a distance; indeed the function of science is said to be to explain all perceptions in terms
of touch.
"Instinct alone," he says, "is knowledge at a distance. It has the same relation to intelligence that
vision has to touch." We may observe in passing that, as appears in many passages, Bergson is a
strong visualizer, whose thought is always conducted by means of visual images.
The essential characteristic of intuition is that it does not divide the world into separate things, as
the intellect does; although Bergson does not use these words, we might describe it as synthetic
rather than analytic. It apprehends a multiplicity, but a multiplicity of interpenetrating processes,
not of spatially external bodies. There are in truth no things: "things and states are only views,
taken by our mind, of becoming. There are no things, there are only actions." This view of the
world, which appears difficult and unnatural to intellect, is easy and natural to intuition. Memory
affords no instance of what is meant, for in memory the past lives on into the present and
interpenetrates it. Apart from mind, the world would be perpetually dying and being born again;
the past would have no reality, and therefore there would be no past. It is memory, with its
correlative desire, that makes the past and the future real and therefore creates true duration and
true time. Intuition alone can understand this mingling of past and future: to the intellect they
remain external, spatially external as it were, to one another. Under the guidance of intuition, we
perceive that "form is only a snapshot view of a transition," and the philosopher "will see the
material world melt back into a single flux."