qualities only.

What then have we to do to progress towards absolute knowledge? Not to
quit experience: quite the contrary; but to extend it and diversify it by
science, while, at the same time, by criticism, we correct in it the
disturbing effects of action, and finally quicken all the results thus
obtained by an effort of sympathy which will make us familiar with the
object until we feel its profound throbbing and its inner wealth.

In connection with this last vital point, which is decisive, call to mind a
celebrated page of Sainte-Beuve where he defines his method: "Enter into
your author, make yourself at home in him, produce him under his different
aspects, make him live, move, and speak as he must have done; follow him to
his fireside and in his domestic habits, as closely as you can...

"Study him, turn him round and round, ask him questions at your leisure;
place him before you...Every feature will appear in its turn, and take the
place of the man himself in this expression...

"An individual reality will gradually blend with and become incarnate in
the vague, abstract, and general type...There is our man..." Yes, that is
exactly what we want: it could not be better put. Transpose this page
from the literary to the metaphysical order, and you have intuition, as
defined by Mr Bergson. You have the return to immediacy.

But a new problem then arises: Is not our intuition of immediacy in danger
of remaining inexpressible? For our language has been formed in view of
practical life, not of pure knowledge.