Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/336

facts, since on our hypothesis everything is bound to happen as if perception were a consequence of the state of the brain. For, in pure perception, the perceived object is a present object, a body which modifies our own. Its image is then actually given, and therefore the facts permit us to say indifferently (though we are far from knowing our own meaning equally well in the two cases) that the cerebral modifications sketch the nascent reactions of our body or that they create in consciousness the duplicate of the present image. But with memory it is otherwise, for a remembrance is the representation of an absent object. Here the two hypotheses must have opposite consequences. If, in the case of a present object, a state of our body is thought sufficient to create the representation of the object, still more must it be thought so in the case of an object that is represented though absent. It is necessary therefore, on this theory, that the remembrance should arise from the attenuated repetition of the cerebral phenomenon which occasioned the primary perception, and should consist simply in a perception weakened. Whence this double thesis: Memory is only a function of the brain, and there is only a difference of intensity between perception and recollection.—If, on the contrary, the cerebral state in no way begets our perception of the present object but merely continues it, it may also prolong and convert into action the recollection of it which we summon up, but it cannot