practical selection.

Taking all the evidence with regard to the preservation of past
experience which is at present available, then, it is safe to say
that, while it cannot, in the nature of things, absolutely prove
Bergson's theory of knowledge, it in no way conflicts with it and even
supports it, positively in the sense that the theory does fit the
facts well enough to explain them (though it goes further than the
actual facts and makes assumptions which can neither be proved nor
disproved by an appeal to them) and negatively in the sense that what
we now know about memory actually conflicts with the "natural" view
that past experience which we are unable to recall has been destroyed,
which is commonly appealed to to show the absurdity of the rival
theory put forward by Bergson.

On the assumption which Bergson makes of a much wider field of direct
knowledge than that which contains what we are accustomed to regard as
the actual facts which we know directly, Bergson's problem becomes how
to account for these facts being so much less than the whole field
which we might have expected to have known. The answer, according to
him, is to be found in our practical need of being prepared in advance
for what is to come, at whatever sacrifice of direct knowledge of past
and present facts. For practical purposes it is essential to use
present and past facts as signs of what is coming so that we may be
ready for it. To this end it is far more important to know the general
laws according to which facts occur than to experience the facts
themselves in 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