ABSTRACT

Analysis and classification, Bergson Henri would admit, are the ways to get more knowledge, of a kind; they enable us to describe situations and they are the starting point of all explanation and prediction. Not only do these methods fail to reveal the situation but the intellectual attitude of abstraction to which they accustom the authors seriously handicaps them when they want not merely to explain the situation but to know it. Before one can analyse, classify and explain they must have something to analyse, some material to work upon: these operations are based upon something which one know directly, what one see, for instance, or touch or feel. This something is the foundation of knowledge, the intellectual operations of analysis classification and the framing of general laws are simply an attempt to describe and explain it. Now according to the authors the attitude of mind required for explaining the facts conflicts with that which is required for knowing them.