knowledge of the whole situation: anyone who said that after you were
able to say what you had stumbled upon you knew less of the whole
situation than you knew before would find it difficult to get you to
agree. And yet this is very much the position which Bergson takes up.
Analysis and classification, he would admit, are the way to get more
knowledge, of a kind; they enable us to describe situations and they
are the starting point of all explanation and prediction. After
analysis and classification you were able to say, "I have stumbled
upon a dog," and having got so far you could then pass on to whatever
general laws you knew of as applying to the classes into which you had
fitted the situation, and by means of these laws still more of the
situation could be classified and explained. Thus by means of the
general law, "dogs lick," you would be furnished with an explanation
if perhaps you felt something warm and damp on your hand, or again
knowledge of this law might lead you to expect such a feeling. When
what we want is to describe or to explain a situation in general terms
then Bergson agrees that analysis and classification are the methods
to employ, but he maintains that these methods which are useful for
describing and explaining are no use for finding out the actual
situation which we may want to describe or explain. And he goes a step
further. Not only do these methods fail to reveal the situation but
the intellectual attitude of abstraction to which they accustom us
seriously handicaps us when we want not merely to explain the
situation but to know it. Now it is the business of science to explain
situations in terms of general laws and so the intellectual method of
abstract-ion is the right one for scientists to employ. Bergson
claims, however, that philosophy has a task quite distinct from that
of science. In whatever situation he finds himself a man may take up
one of two attitudes, he may either adopt a practical attitude, in
which case he will set to work to explain the situation in order that