Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/174

the cells of the cortex: it would be wonderful indeed that disease should always attack these cells in the same order.^[1] But the fact can be explained, if we admit that memories need, for their actualization, a motor ally, and that they require for their recall a kind of mental attitude which must itself be engrafted upon an attitude of the body. If such be the case, verbs in general, which essentially express imitable actions, are precisely the words that a bodily effort might enable us to recapture when the function of language has all but escaped us: proper names, on the other hand, being of all words the most remote from those impersonal actions which our body can sketch out, are those which a weakening of the function will earliest affect. It is a noteworthy fact that the aphasic patient, who has become as a rule incapable of finding the noun he seeks, may replace it by an appropriate periphrasis into which other nouns,^[2] and perhaps even the evasive noun itself, enter. Unable to think of the precise word, he has thought of the corresponding action, and this attitude has determined the general direction of a movement from which the phrase then springs. So likewise it may happen to any of us. that, having retained the initial of a forgotten name, we recover the name by repeating the

1. Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologische Psychologie. Leipzig, 1903, vol i, 314–315.
2. Bernard, De l'aphasie. Paris, 1889, pp. 171 and 174.