Chap­ter VII begins with a bold chal­lenge to one of mod­ern philosophy’s most influ­en­tial tra­di­tions. Hen­ri Berg­son, in his evolv­ing vision of thought and life, steps away from the rigid con­tours drawn by thinkers like Kant. Where Kant enclosed rea­son with­in the bounds of struc­ture and cri­tique, Berg­son sees such con­fine­ment as inad­e­quate for under­stand­ing the liv­ing, breath­ing nature of thought. Rather than treat­ing knowl­edge as a con­struct exam­ined through sta­t­ic meth­ods, he asks us to view it as part of life’s ever-chang­ing rhythm. The con­ven­tion­al method, based on dis­sect­ing spon­ta­neous men­tal activ­i­ties, restricts under­stand­ing instead of expand­ing it. By lean­ing on back­ward-look­ing cri­tique, tra­di­tion­al phi­los­o­phy risks detach­ing rea­son from its ori­gins in motion and cre­ativ­i­ty.

Berg­son turns toward life as the prop­er foun­da­tion for under­stand­ing con­scious­ness. He argues that life isn’t a mech­a­nism but an unfold­ing, a spir­i­tu­al activ­i­ty that does not stay still but always evolves. Intel­li­gence, for him, is one path among sev­er­al tak­en by thought—useful, yes, but not the whole. It has evolved to serve action, to fix moments into cat­e­gories that sup­port sur­vival and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Yet, in doing so, it los­es touch with the deep­er flu­id­i­ty of liv­ing expe­ri­ence. Its nature is ana­lyt­ic, lin­guis­tic, and practical—but often miss­es what flows beneath. Berg­son doesn’t reject intel­li­gence but places it with­in a larg­er frame­work of men­tal pos­si­bil­i­ty. Its lim­i­ta­tions, he insists, become clear only when con­trast­ed with intu­ition.

Intu­ition offers access to a rich­er, more inte­grat­ed form of know­ing. Where intel­li­gence iso­lates and defines, intu­ition unites and embraces. It does not slice real­i­ty into man­age­able pieces but attempts to grasp it as a whole, even if briefly. This philo­soph­i­cal intu­ition, root­ed in expe­ri­ence rather than abstrac­tion, offers clar­i­ty not through dis­sec­tion but through res­o­nance. It allows us to par­tic­i­pate in the move­ment of life instead of mere­ly observ­ing it from a dis­tance. For Berg­son, this method doesn’t oppose rea­son but com­ple­ments and deep­ens it. Intu­ition taps into the strands of con­scious­ness that evo­lu­tion didn’t dis­card but sim­ply divert­ed from prac­ti­cal intel­li­gence. In that recon­nec­tion, a fuller image of thought and exis­tence begins to form.

In this view, rea­son is not a com­plet­ed form but an evolv­ing func­tion. It grows and bends along with con­scious­ness, capa­ble of expand­ing to meet new real­i­ties. Berg­son sees rea­son not as a fin­ished prod­uct but as a seed still unfold­ing. When fixed in place, it hard­ens into dog­ma; when allowed to move, it trans­forms under­stand­ing. His cri­tique is not mere­ly about method—it is about reclaim­ing a wider scope of know­ing. Intel­li­gence becomes only one melody in a broad­er har­mo­ny of thought. To redis­cov­er intu­ition is to redis­cov­er music beneath the noise of facts.

The chap­ter pro­pos­es that knowl­edge itself must be reimag­ined. It is not just accu­mu­la­tion, but con­nec­tion. Berg­son advo­cates for a shift away from dis­sect­ing expe­ri­ences toward immers­ing in them. Through intu­ition, the know­er and the known are no longer sep­a­rate, but momen­tar­i­ly one. This uni­ty reflects the core truth of his phi­los­o­phy: that life and thought are not strangers, but reflec­tions of each oth­er. Evo­lu­tion, far from being a sim­ple bio­log­i­cal process, becomes a philo­soph­i­cal jour­ney of con­scious­ness expand­ing into new realms. Each advance in life is mir­rored by a pos­si­ble advance in thought. Thus, knowl­edge evolves not by force, but by attune­ment.

This vision does not call for aban­don­ing analy­sis but for sit­u­at­ing it with­in a more flex­i­ble, human approach. We are remind­ed that lan­guage and struc­ture, though pow­er­ful, do not exhaust the mean­ing of exis­tence. The nuances of time, mem­o­ry, free­dom, and self can­not be trapped in for­mu­las. They must be felt, lived, intu­it­ed. Bergson’s rede­f­i­n­i­tion of rea­son encour­ages humil­i­ty in philosophy—an open­ness to dimen­sions of life that resist easy expres­sion. He does not close doors but opens win­dows into fields of pos­si­bil­i­ty that our cur­rent under­stand­ing bare­ly touch­es.

In clos­ing, Berg­son invites a deep­er engage­ment with the world—not through intel­lec­tu­al con­quest, but through intu­itive col­lab­o­ra­tion. He reframes rea­son as a part­ner in cre­ation, not mere­ly a crit­ic of it. In this part­ner­ship, knowl­edge becomes a liv­ing, mov­ing expe­ri­ence rather than a sta­t­ic pos­ses­sion. It breathes, it unfolds, and it reflects the cre­ative essence of life itself. What he offers is not just a new method but a new pos­ture toward reality—one that seeks har­mo­ny over mas­tery, pres­ence over dis­tance. Through this lens, the human mind is no longer a mir­ror of a fixed world but a par­tic­i­pant in an unfin­ished uni­verse.