simply as material for constructing explanations and to pay so little
attention to them for their own sakes that we simply take it for
granted that they must be what our explanations lead us to suppose
they are.

Now according to Bergson the attitude of mind required for explaining
the facts conflicts with that which is required for knowing them. From
the point of view simply of knowing, the facts are all equally
important and we cannot afford to discriminate, but for explanation
some facts are very much more important than others. When we want to
explain, therefore, rather than simply to know, we tend to concentrate
our attention upon these practically important facts and pass over the
rest. For in order to describe and explain a situation we have to
classify it, and in order to do this we must pick out in it properties
required for membership of some one or other of the classes known to
us. In the situation which we originally considered by way of
illustration, for instance, you had to pick out the qualities of
roughness, warmth and so on, in order to classify what you had
stumbled upon as "a dog." Now the picking out of these particular
qualities is really an operation of abstraction from the situation as
a whole: they were the important features of the situation from the
point of view of classifying what you had stumbled upon, but they by
no means exhausted the whole situation. Our preoccupation with
explaining the facts, then, leads us to treat what we know directly as
so much material for abstraction.

This intellectual attitude, as Bergson calls it, though practically
useful, has, according to him, two grave drawbacks from the point of
view of speculation. By focussing our attention upon anything less
than the whole fact, and so isolating a part from the rest, he says we