No aprehendemos de nuestros sentimientos más que su aspecto impersonal, aquel que el lenguaje ha podido clasificar de una vez por todas porque. más o… - Henri Bergson

The prestige of the Nobel Prize is due to many causes, but in particular to its twofold idealistic and international character: idealistic in that it has been designed for works of lofty inspiration; international in that it is awarded after the production of different countries has been minutely studied and the intellectual balance sheet of the whole world has been drawn up. Free from all other considerations and ignoring any but intellectual values, the judges have deliberately taken their place in what the philosophers have called a community of the mind.

The universe our reason conceives is, in fact, a universe which extends infinitely beyond human experience, the characteristic of reason being to prolong the data of experience, to extend them by way of generalization, in order to make us conceive many more things than we shall ever perceive. In such a universe man is expected to do very little and to occupy very little space: what he gives to his intelligence he takes away from his will. Above all, having attributed to his thought the power of embracing everything, he is obliged to imagine all things in terms of thought; of his aspirations, his desires, his enthusiasms he cannot ask enlightenment in a world in which everything accessible to him has been first considered by him as translatable into pure ideas. His sensibility cannot enlighten his intelligence, for it is with his intelligence that he has made what light there is. Most philosophies, therefore, restrict our experience on the side of feeling and will as at the same time they indefinitely prolong it on the side of thought.

One currently and perhaps imprudently calls “reason” this conservative logic which governs thought in common; conversation greatly resembles conservation. It is there that it is at home. And there it exercises a legitimate authority. Theoretically, in fact, conversation should bear only upon things of the social life. And the essential object of society is to insert a certain fixity into universal mobility. Societies are just so many islands consolidated here and there in the ocean of becoming.