much as his own vibrations and wave lengths. When a scientist frames a
hypothesis he employs the intellectual method of substitution with
full consciousness of what he is about; he recognises that its terms
are abstractions and not facts. But the intellectual method of
explaining by substituting general abstractions for particular facts
is not confined to science. All description and explanation, from the
first uncritical assumptions of common sense right up to the latest
scientific hypothesis employs the intellectual method of substituting
abstractions for actual facts. The common sense world of things,
events, qualities, minds, feelings, and so on, in which we all pass
our every day lives is an early and somewhat crude attempt to describe
the continually changing fact which each of us experiences directly,
but it is perhaps more misleading than the later elaborate
constructions of chemistry, physics, biology or physchology in that
things and qualities are more easily mistaken for facts than more
obviously hypothetical assumptions. Bergson points out that the
various things of which this common sense world consists, solid
tables, green grass, anger, hope, etc., are not facts: these things,
he insists, are only abstractions. They are convenient for enabling us
to describe and explain the actual facts which each of us experiences
directly, and they are based upon these facts in the sense of being
abstracted from them. The objection to them is that we are too much
inclined to take it for granted that these things and qualities and
events actually are facts themselves, and in so doing to lose sight of
the real facts altogether. In support of his view that things having
qualities in successive relations are mere abstractions Bergson points
out that whenever we stop to examine what it actually is that we know
directly we can see at once that this fact does not consist of things
and qualities at all: things and qualities are clearly marked off one
from another,; they change as a series of distinct terms, but in what