The Misuse of Mind | Page 9

their fullness. Our intellectual habits which prompt us to set to work at once in every unfamiliar situation to analyse and classify it fit us for discovering these laws: in so far as we are intellectual we incline to regard facts mainly as material for arriving at descriptions which themselves form the material out of which, by a further intellectual effort, explanations are framed in terms of general laws, which we need to know if we are to be ready for what is going to happen. Now these laws are general laws applying to whole classes of facts of one kind, or another. Facts, therefore, only form material for discovering laws in so far as they can be classified into kinds.
The first step in classifying a fact is called analysis and consists in discovering common qualities which the fact possesses. According to Bergson the discovery of common qualities in a fact consists simply in learning to overlook everything in that fact except the respects in which it can be said to be of the same kind, and so to belong to the same class, as other facts. Far from adding to our direct knowledge, as common sense supposes, he holds that analysis consists in shutting our eyes to the individuality of facts in order to dwell only upon what they have in common with one another. Starting, then, from the wider field of knowledge which he assumes Bergson explains how we reach the limited facts, which are all that we ordinarily know, by saying that these facts are arrived at by selection out of this much wider field. It is not the disinterested love of knowledge that determines how much we shall actually attend to: our selection from the whole field of what facts we will attend to is determined by the pressing need of being prepared in advance for the facts which are to come. We attend only to so much of the whole of what is, in some sense, directly known to us as will be useful for framing the general laws which enable us to prepare in advance for what is coming. This practical utility explains why analysis and classification seem to us to be the obvious way of dealing with what we know.
The work of abstraction by which, treating the facts directly known as so much material for framing explanations, we pass from these actual facts to the general laws which explain them, falls into four stages, and at each stage, according to Bergson, as we go further and further from the original fact directly known, the two vices of the intellectual method, limitation and distortion of the actual fact, become more and more apparent.
Starting from the fact directly known, the first thing, as we have seen, is to learn to distinguish common qualities which it shares in common with some, but not all, other facts; the next thing is to classify it by fitting it into the further groups to which these various qualities entitle it to belong. The moment a quality has been distinguished in a fact that fact has been fitted into a class, the class which consists of all the facts in which that quality can be distinguished. Thus, in our original illustration, when you first distinguished warmth, etc., you were beginning to fit your fact into classes: when you perceived warmth you fitted it into the class of warm objects, and it was the same with the other qualities of roughness, size and smell. This fitting of facts into classes according to the common qualities distinguished in them might be called a preliminary classification, but we shall use the term analysis for this preliminary grouping of facts according to their qualities, keeping the term classification for the next step, which you took when you realized "this is a dog," which consists in the discovery not of mere disconnected qualities but of "real things." Just as every quality, such as "warm" or "hairy" or "sweet" or "cold" is a class of actual facts, so every "real thing" such as "a dog" or "an ice cream" is a class of qualities. Thus a quality is once, and a "real thing" is twice, removed from actual fact, and the more energetically we pursue the intellectual work of abstraction the further we get from the fact itself from which we began. The point of grouping facts into classes, whether by analysing them into qualities or classifying them into "real things," is that we can then apply to the particular fact all that we know to be true in general of whatever belongs to these various classes: in a word, once we have fitted a fact into a class we can apply to it all the general laws which are known to apply to that class.
Common