IV.

The immediate perception of reality is not all; we have still to translate
this perception into intelligible language, into a connected chain of
concepts; failing which, it would seem, we should not have knowledge in the
strict sense of the word, we should not have truth.

Without language, intuition, supposing it came to birth, would remain
intransmissible and incommunicable, and would perish in a solitary cry. By
language alone are we enabled to submit it to a positive test: the letter
is the ballast of the mind, the body which allows it to act, and in acting
to scatter the unreal delusions of dream.

The act of pure intuition demands so great an inner tension from thought
that it can only be very rare and very fugitive: a few rapid gleams here
and there; and these dawning glimpses must be sustained, and afterwards
united, and that again is the work of language.

But while language is thus necessary, no less necessary is a criticism of
ordinary language, and of the methods familiar to the understanding. These
forms of reflected knowledge, these processes of analysis really convey
secretly all the postulates of practical action. But it is imperative that
language should translate, not betray; that the body of formulae should not
stifle the soul of intuition. We shall see in what the work of reform and
conversion imposed on the philosopher precisely consists.

The attitude of the ordinary proceedings of common thought can be stated in
a few words. Place the object studied before yourself as an exterior
"thing." Then place yourself outside it, in perspective, at points of
vantage on a circumference, whence you can only see the object of your