Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/106

repeating itself more or less completely in the absence of the object, will suffice to reproduce perception: memory will be entirely explicable by the brain. But if we find that the cerebral mechanism does indeed in some sort condition memories, but is in no way sufficient to ensure their survival; if it concerns, in remembered perception, our action rather than our representation; we shall be able to infer that it plays an analogous part in perception itself, and that its office is merely to ensure our effective action on the object present. Our first conclusion may thus find its verification.—There would still remain this second conclusion, which is of a more metaphysical order,—viz.: that in pure perception we are actually placed outside ourselves, we touch the reality of the object in an immediate intuition. Here also an experimental verification is impossible, since the practical results are absolutely the same whether the reality of the object is intuitively perceived or whether it is rationally constructed. But here again a study of memory may decide between the two hypotheses. For, in the second, there is only a difference of intensity, or more generally, of degree, between perception and recollection, since they are both self-sufficient phenomena of representation. But if, on the contrary, we find that the difference between perception and recollection is not merely in degree, but is a radical difference in kind, the presumption will