absolute reality would be the whole of these degrees and moments, and many
others as well, no doubt. Or rather, to secure absolute intuition of
matter, we should have on the one hand to get rid of all that our practical
needs have constructed, restore on the other all the effective tendencies
they have extinguished, follow the complete scale of qualitative
concentrations and dilutions, and pass, by a kind of sympathy, into the
incessantly moving play of all the possible innumerable contractions or
resolutions; with the result that in the end we should succeed, by a
simultaneous view as it were, in grasping, according to their infinitely
various modes, the phases of this matter which, though at present latent,
admit of "perception."

Thus, in the case before us, absolute knowledge is found to be the result
of integral experience; and though we cannot attain the term, we see at any
rate in what direction we should have to work to reach it.

Now it must be stated that our realisable knowledge is at every moment
partial and limited rather than exterior and relative, for our effective
perception is related to matter in itself as the part to the whole. Our
least perceptions are actually based on pure perception, and "we are aware
of the elementary disturbances which constitute matter, in the perceptible
quality in which they suffer contraction, as we are aware of the beating of
our heart in the general feeling that we have of living." ("The Journal of
Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods", 7th July 1910.)

But the preoccupation of practical action, coming between reality and
ourselves, produces the fragmentary world of common-sense, much as an
absorbing medium resolves into separate rays the continuous spectrum of a
luminous body; whilst the rhythm of duration, and the degree of tension
peculiar to our consciousness, limit us to the apprehension of certain