successive analyses you will never reconstruct the least intuition, just
as, no matter how you distribute water, you will never reconstruct the
reservoir in its original condition.

Begin from intuition: it is a summit from which we can descend by infinite
slopes; it is a picture which we can place in an infinite number of frames.
But all the frames together will not recompose the picture, and the lower
ends of all the slopes will not explain how they meet at the summit.
Intuition is a necessary beginning; it is the impulse which sets the
analysis in motion, and gives it direction; it is the sounding which brings
it to solid bottom; the soul which assures its unity. "I shall never
understand how black and white interpenetrate, if I have not seen grey, but
I understand without trouble, after once seeing grey, how we can regard it
from the double point of view of black and white." ("Introduction to
Metaphysics.")

Here are some letters which you can arrange in chains in a thousand ways:
the indivisible sense running along the chain, and making one phrase of it,
is the original cause of the writing, not its consequence. Thus it is with
intuition in relation to analysis. But beginnings and generative
activities are the proper object of the philosopher. Thus the conversion
and reform incumbent on him consist essentially in a transition from the
analytic to the intuitive point of view.

The result is that the chosen instrument of philosophic thought is
metaphor; and of metaphor we know Mr Bergson to be an incomparable master.
What we have to do, he says himself, is "to elicit a certain active force
which in most men is liable to be trammelled by mental habits more useful
to life," to awaken in them the feeling of the immediate, original, and
concrete. But "many different images, borrowed from very different orders