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.