In An Introduction to Metaphysics Henri Bergson presents a new method for philosophical investigation. Bergson’s aim is to spark a revolution in the science of metaphysics. If metaphysics is possible Bergson believes that it can only be accomplished in an effort of intuition which inverts the habitual direction of the work of thought. The habitual direction of the work of thought towards knowing something consists in moving from concepts to a reality, whereby we know such only relatively, through the mediation of symbols through analysis. Bergson’s claim is that when philosophizing in such a manner philosophers are incapable of penetrating into a reality. They are, rather, limited to adopting external viewpoints of a real

As we have seen, what analysis cannot achieve, intuition can, that is, a penetration into a reality. Bergson says, “There is one reality, at least, which we all seize from within, by intuition and not by simple analysis. It is our own personality in its flowing through time---our self which endures.” For Bergson, the essence of our self, or that which constitutes our being, is duration, the absolute which cannot be represented by symbols or concepts and can only be given in intuition. Here, as Bergson sees it, concerns the vital task of the philosopher, which is to promote the effort required in order to invert the habitual direction of the work of thought and thereby grasp, by means of the intellectual sympathy called intuition, the mobile reality known as duration. Bergson gives us a few images to promote this effort. He begins by explaining the inner life as “a continuous flux, a succession of states, each of which announces that which follows and contains that which precedes it. They can, properly speaking, only be said to form multiple states when I have already passed them and turn back to observe their track.” He adds that none of the states has a beginning or end, but that all extend into each other. He compares this inner life to the unrolling of a coil, but also “to a continual rolling up, like that of a thread on a ball, for our past follows us, it swells incessantly with the present that it picks up on its way; and consciousness means memory.” He then gives us the image of a spectrum to describe duration and says that “a current of feeling which passed along the spectrum, assuming in turn the tint of each of its shades, would experience a series of gradual changes, each of which would announce the one to follow and would sum up those which preceded it.” Lastly, we are given the image of an infinitely small elastic body, contracted to a mathematical point, being drawn out gradually in such a way that from the point comes a constantly lengthening line. He asks us not to focus on the line as a line, but on the action by which it is traced. This movement itself, the act of tension or extension, is pure mobility, an image of the development of our self in duration. Importantly, Bergson notes that the inner life of duration cannot, in the end, be represented by images, which can only “direct consciousness to the precise point where there is an intuition of duration to be seized”. Concepts, of which I’ve already spoken, are even less able to represent duration, for they are abstract while at least images are concrete illustrations. Concepts (which are in reality symbols substituted for the object they symbolize) demand no effort of intuition, and retain only that part of the object, in this case duration, which is common to it and to others. They express, still more than the image does, a comparison between the object and others that resemble it. But as the comparison has made manifest a resemblance, as the resemblance is a property of the object, and as a property has every appearance of being a part of the object which possesses it, we deceive ourselves into believing that by setting concept beside concept we are reconstructing the whole of the object with its parts, thus obtaining its intellectual equivalent, Bergson says, “In this way we believe we can form a faithful representation of duration by setting in line the concepts of unity, multiplicity, continuity, finite or infinite divisibility, etc. There precisely is the i

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