ABSTRACT
Common sense starts out with the assumption that what we know directly is such things as trees, grass, anger, hope and so on, and that these things have qualities such as solidity, greenness, unpleasantness and so on, which are also facts directly known. The more people shake themselves free from the common sense and scientific bias towards substituting explanations for actual facts the more clearly they see that this continuous process of changing is the very essence of what they know directly, and the more they realize how unlike such a continuous process is to any series of stages in relation of succession. Language plays a most important part in forming our habit of treating all facts as material for generalisation, and it is largely to the influence of the words which the authors use for describing facts that Bergson Henri attributes their readiness to take it for granted that facts have the same logical form as abstractions.
