Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/90

sharing this double labour between two categories of organs, the purpose of the first, called organs of nutrition, being to maintain the second: these last are made for action; they have as their simple type a chain of nervous elements, connecting two extremities of which the one receives external impressions and the other executes movements. Thus, to return to the example of visual perception, the office of the rods and cones is merely to receive excitations which will be subsequently elaborated into movements, either accomplished or nascent. No perception can result from this, and nowhere, in the nervous system, are there conscious centres; but perception arises from the same cause which has brought into being the chain of nervous elements, with the organs which sustain them and with life in general. It expresses and measures the power of action in the living being, the indetermination of the movement or of the action which will follow the receipt of the stimulus. This indetermination, as we have shown, will express itself in a reflexion upon themselves, or better in a division, of the images which surround our body; and, as the chain of nervous elements which receives, arrests, and transmits movements is the seat of this indetermination and gives its measure, our perception will follow all the detail and will appear to express all the variations of the nervous elements themselves. Perception, in its pure state, is then, in very truth, a part of things. And as for affective sensation, it does