Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/126

serves as the basis of the motor habit, is at the same time the substratum of the conscious image. Hence the strange hypothesis of recollections stored in the brain, which are supposed to become conscious as though by a miracle, and bring us back to the past by a process that is left unexplained. True, some observers do not make so light of the conscious aspect of the operation, and see in it something more than an epiphenomenon. But, as they have not begun by isolating the memory which retains and sets out the successive repetitions side by side in the form of memory images, since they confound it with the habit which is perfected by use, they are led to believe that the effect of repetition is brought to bear upon one and the same single and indivisible phenomenon which merely grows stronger by recurrence: and, as this phenomenon clearly ends by being merely a motor habit corresponding to a mechanism, cerebral or other, they are led, whether they will or no, to suppose that some mechanism of this kind was from the beginning behind the image and that the brain is an organ of representation. We are now about to consider these intermediate states, and distinguish in each of them the part which belongs to nascent action, that is to say of the brain, and the part of independent memory, that is to say of memory-images. What are these states? Being partly motor they must, on our hypothesis, prolong a present perception; but, on the other hand, inasmuch as they are images, they reproduce past perceptions.