II. All the difficulties raised by this problem, either in ordinary dualism, or in materialism and Perception idealism, come from considering, in the Sied p'hySSaT' phenomena of perception and memory, menta! are the physical and the mental as duplicates dSpiicJtw of the one of the other. Suppose I place each other, myself at the materialist point of view of the epiphenomenal consciousness: I am quite unable to understand why certain cerebral pheno mena are accompanied by consciousness, that is to say, of what use could be, or how could ever arise, the conscious repetition of the material uni verse I have begun by positing. Suppose I prefer idealism: I then allow myself only per ceptions, and my body is one of them. But whereas observation shows me that the images I perceive are entirely changed by very slight alterations of the image I call my body (since I have only to shut my eyes and my visual universe disappears), science assures me that all phenomena must succeed and condition one another according to a determined order, in which SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 301 effects are strictly proportioned to causes. I am obliged, therefore, to seek, in the image which I call my body, and which follows me everywhere, for changes which shall be the equivalents — but the well-regulated equivalents, now deducible from each other — of the images which succeed one another around my body: the cerebral movements, to which I am led back in this way, again are the duplicates of my percep tions. It is true that these movements are still perceptions, ' possible ' perceptions, — so that this second hypothesis is more intelligible than the first; but, on the other hand, it must sup pose, in its turn, an inexplicable correspondence between my real perception of things and my possible perception of certain cerebral movements which do not in any way resemble these things. When we look at it closely, we shall see that this is the reef upon which all idealism is wrecked: there is no possible transition from the order which is perceived by our senses to the order which we are to conceive for the sake of our science, — or, if we are dealing more particularly with the Kantian idealism, no possible transition from sense to understanding. — So my only refuge seems to be ordinary dualism. I place matter on this side, mind on that, and I suppose that cerebral movements are the cause or the occasion of my representation of objects. But if they are its cause, if they are enough to produce it, I must fall back, step by step, upon the material- 302 MATTER AND MEMORY istic hypothesis of an epiphenomenal conscious ness. If they are only its occasion, I thereby suppose that they do not resemble it in any way, and so, depriving matter of all the qualities which I con ferred upon it in my representation, I come back to idealism. Idealism and materialism are then the two poles between which this kind of dualism will always oscillate; and when, in order to main tain the duality of substances, it decides to make them both of equal rank, it will be led to regard them as two translations of one and the same original, two parallel and predetermined develop ments of a single principle, and thus to deny their reciprocal influence, and, by an inevitable conse quence, to sacrifice freedom.
Now, if we look beneath these three hypo theses, we find that they have a common basis: The mistake a^ three regard the elementary opera- SfleJ£?0that tions °* the mind> perception and SlaSenwrF memory, as operations of pure know- knowiedge. ledge. What they place at the origin j£eto they °* consci°usness is either the useless action. duplicate of an external reality or the inert material of an intellectual construction entirely disinterested: but they always neglect the relation of perception with action and of memory with conduct. Now, it is no doubt pos sible to conceive, as an ideal limit, a memory and a perception that are disinterested; but, in fact, it is towards action that memory and perception are turned; it is action that the body pre- SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 303 pares. Do we consider perception? The grow ing complexity of the nervous system shunts the excitation received on to an ever larger variety of motor mechanisms, and so sketches out simultaneously an ever larger number of possible actions. Do we turn to memory? We note that its primary function is to evoke all those past perceptions which are analogous to the present perception, to recall to us what preceded and followed them, and so to suggest to us that decision which is the most useful. But this is not all. By allowing us to grasp in a single intuition multiple moments of duration, it frees us from the movement of the flow of things, that is to say, from the rhythm of necessity. The more of these moments memory can contract into one, the firmer is the hold which it gives to us on matter: so that the memory of a living being appears indeed to measure, above all, its powers of action upon things, and to be only the intellectual reverberation of this power. Let us start, then, from this energy, as from the true principle: let us suppose that the body is a centre of action, and only a centre of action. We must see what con sequences thence result for perception, for memory, and for the relations between body and mind.
III. To take perception first. Here is my body with its ' perceptive centres.' These centres Perception vibrate, and I have the representation of things. On the other hand I have supposed that these vibrations can 304 MATTER AND MEMORY neither produce nor translate my perception. It is, then, outside them. Where is it? I can not hesitate as to the answer: positing my body, I posit a certain image, but with it also the aggregate of the other images, since there is no material image which does not owe its qualities, its determinations, in short its existence, to the place which it occupies in the totality of the uni verse. My perception can, then, only be some part of these objects themselves; it is in them rather than they in it. But what is it exactly within them? I see that my perception appears to follow all the vibratory detail of the so- called sensitive nerves; and on the other hand I know that the role of their vibrations is solely to prepare the reaction of my body on neighbouring bodies, to sketch out my virtual actions. Per ception, therefore, consists in detaching, from the totality of objects, the possible action of my body upon them. Perception appears, then, as only a choice. It creates nothing; its office, on the con trary, is to eliminate from the totality of images all those on which I can have no hold, and then, from each of those which I retain, all that does not concern the needs of the image which I call my body. Such is, at least, much simplified, the way we explain or describe schematically what we have called pure perception. Let us mark out at once the intermediate place which we thus take up between realism and idealism.
That every reality has a kinship, an analogy, SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 305 in short a relation with consciousness — this is Though it what we concede to idealism by the very only a part fact that we term things ' images.' No things. philosophical doctrine, moreover, pro vided that it is consistent with itself, can escape from this conclusion. But if we could assemble all the states of consciousness, past, present, and possible, of all conscious beings, we should still only have gathered a very small part of material reality, because images outrun perception on every side. It is just these images that science and metaphysic seek to reconstitute, thus restor ing the whole of a chain of which our perception grasps only a few links. But in order thus to discover between perception and reality the relation of the part to the whole, it is necessary to leave to perception its true office, which is to prepare actions. This is what idealism fails to do. Why is it unable, as we said just now, to pass from the order manifested in perception to the order which is successful in science, that is to say, from the contingency with which our sensa tions appear to follow each other to the deter minism which binds together the phenomena of nature? Precisely because it attributes to con sciousness, in perception, a speculative r61e, so that it is impossible to see what interest this conscious ness has in allowing to escape, between two sen sations for instance, the intermediate links through which the second might be deduced from the first. These intermediaries and their strict order thus 3O6 MATTER AND MEMORY remain obscure, whether, with Mill, we make the intermediaries into ' possible sensations/ or, with Kant, hold the substructure of the order to be the work of an impersonal understand ing. But suppose that my conscious perception has an entirely practical destination, that it simply indicates, in the aggregate of things, that which interests my possible action upon them: I can then understand that all the rest escapes me, and that, nevertheless, all the rest is of the same nature as what I perceive. My conscious ness of matter is then no longer either subjective, as it is for English idealism, or relative, as it is for the Kantian idealism. It is not subjec tive, for it is in things rather than in me. It is not relative, because the relation between the ' phenomenon ' and the ' thing ' is not that of appearance to reality, but merely that of the part to the whole.
Here we seem to return to realism. But real ism, unless corrected on an essential point, is as The mistake inacceptable as idealism, and for the is to set up.., homogeneous same reason. Idealism, we said, cannot space as a real.,,.
or even ideal pass from the order manifested in perto extension, ception to the order which is successful in science, that is to say to reality. Inversely, realism fails to draw from reality the immediate consciousness which we have of it. Taking 'the point of view of ordinary realism, we have, on the one hand, a composite matter made up of more or less independent parts, diffused through- SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 307 out space, and, on the other, a mind which can have no point of contact with matter, unless it be, as materialists maintain, the unintelligible epiphenomenon. If we prefer the standpoint of the Kantian realism, we find between the ' thing-in-itself,' that is to say the real, and the ' sensuous manifold ' from which we construct our knowledge, no conceivable relation, no common measure. Now, if we get to the bottom of these two extreme forms of realism, we see that they converge towards the same point: both raise homo geneous space as a barrier between the intellect and things. The simpler realism makes of this space a real medium, in which things are in sus pension; Kantian realism regards it as an ideal medium, in which the multiplicity of sensations is coordinated; but for both of them this medium is given to begin with, as the necessary condition of what comes to abide in it. And if we try to get to the bottom of this common hypo thesis, in its turn, we find that it consists in at tributing to homogeneous space a disinterested office: space is supposed either merely to uphold material reality, or to have the function, still purely speculative, of furnishing sensations with means of coordinating themselves. So that the obscurity of realism, like that of idealism, comes from the fact that, in both of them, our conscious perception and the conditions of our conscious perception are assumed to point to pure knowledge, not to action. — But suppose now 308 MATTER AND MEMORY that this homogeneous space is not logically an terior, but posterior to material things and to the pure knowledge which we can have of them; suppose that extensity is prior to space; suppose that homogeneous space concerns our action and only our action, being like an infinitely fine net work which we stretch beneath material con tinuity in order to render ourselves masters of it, to decompose it according to the plan of our activities and our needs. Then, not only has our hypothesis the advantage of bringing us into harmony with science, which shows us each thing exercising an influence on all the others and con sequently occupying, in a certain sense, the whole of the extended (although we perceive of this thing only its centre and mark its limits at the point where our body ceases to have any hold upon it). Not only has it the advantage, in metaphysic, of suppressing or lessening the contra dictions raised by divisibility in space, — contra dictions which always arise, as we have shown, from our failure to dissociate the two points of view, that of action from that of knowledge. It has, above all, the advantage of overthrowing the insurmountable barriers raised by realism be tween the extended world and our perception of it. For whereas this doctrine assumes on the one hand an external reality which is multiple and divided, and on the other sensations alien from extensity and without possible contact with it, we find that concrete extensity is not really SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 309 divided, any more than immediate perception is in truth unextended. Starting from realism, we come back to the point to which idealism had led us; we replace perception in things. And we see realism and idealism ready to come to an under standing when we set aside the postulate, uncriti cally accepted by both, which served them as a common frontier.
To sum up: if we suppose an extended con tinuum, and, in this continuum, the centre of real action which is represented by our body, its activity will appear to illumine all those parts of matter with which at each successive moment it can deal. The same needs, the same power of action, which have delimited our body in matter, will also carve out distinct bodies in the sur rounding medium. Everything will happen as if we allowed to filter through us that action of ex ternal things which is real, in order to arrest and retain that which is virtual: this virtual action of things upon our body and of our body upon things is our perception itself. But since the excitations which our body receives from surrounding bodies determine unceasingly, within its substance, nascent reactions, — since these internal movements of the cerebral substance thus sketch out at every mo ment our possible action on things, the state of the brain exactly corresponds to the perception. It is neither its cause, nor its effect, nor in any sense its duplicate: it merely continues it, the perception being our virtual action and the cere bral state our action already begun.
3TO MATTER AND MEMORY IV. But this theory of ' pure perception * had to be both qualified and completed in regard to two Real action points. For the so-called ' pure ' percep- Sttonirtnal tion> which is like a fragment of reality, SSuS^d detached just as it is, would belong to a memory. being unable to mingle with the percep tion of other bodies that of its own body, that is to say, its affections; nor with its intuition of the actual moment that of other moments, that is to say, its memory. In other words, we have, to begin with, and for the convenience of study, treated the living body as a mathematical point in space and conscious perception as a mathe matical instant in time. We then had to restore to the body its extensity and to perception its duration. By this we restored to consciousness its two subjective elements, affectivity and memory.
What is an affection? Our perception, we said, indicates the possible action of our body on others. But our body, being extended, is capable of acting upon itself as well as upon other bodies. Into our perception, then, something of our body must enter. When we are dealing with external bodies, these are, by hypothesis, separated from ours by a space, greater or less, which measures the remoteness in time of their promise or of their menace: this is why our perception of these bodies indicates only possible actions. But the more the distance diminishes between these bodies and our own, the more the possible action SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 311 tends to transform itself into a real action, the call for action becoming more urgent in the measure and proportion that the distance dimi nishes. And when this distance is nil, that is to say when the body to be perceived is our own body, it is a real and no longer a virtual action that our perception sketches out. Such is, precisely, the nature of pain, an actual effort of the damaged part to set things to rights, an effort that is local, isolated, and thereby con demned to failure, in an organism which can no longer act except as a whole. Pain is therefore in the place where it is felt, as the object is at the place where it is perceived. Between the affec tion felt and the image perceived there is this difference, that the affection is within our body, the image outside our body. And that is why the surface of our body, the common limit of this and of other bodies, is given to us in the form both of sensations and of an image.
In this interiority of affective sensation con sists its subjectivity; in that exteriority of images in general their objectivity. But here again we encounter the ever-recurring mistake with which we have been confronted throughout this work. It is supposed that perception and sensation exist for their own sake; the philosopher ascribes to them an entirely speculative function; and, as he has overlooked those real and virtual actions with which sensation and perception are bound up and by which, according as the action 312 MATTER AND MEMORY is virtual or real, perception and sensation are characterized and distinguished, he becomes un able to find any other difference between them than a difference of degree. Then, profiting by the fact that affective sensation is but vaguely localized (because the effort it involves is an indistinct effort) at once he declares it to be unextended; and these attenuated affections or unextended sensations he sets up as the material with which we are supposed to build up images in space. Thereby he condemns himself to an impossibility of explaining either whence arise the elements of consciousness, or sensations, which he sets up as so many absolutes, or how, unex tended, they find their way to space and are co ordinated there, or why, in it, they adopt a par ticular order rather than any other, or, finally, how they manage to make up an experience which is regular and common to all men. This experi ence, the necessary field of our activity, is, on the contrary, what we should start from. Pure perceptions, therefore, or images, are what we should posit at the outset. And sensations, far from being the materials from which the image is wrought, will then appear as the impurity which is introduced into it, being that part of our own body which we project into all others. V. But, as long as we confine ourselves to sensation and to pure perception, we can hardly be said to be dealing with the spirit. No doubt we demonstrate, as against the theory of an SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 313 epiphenomenal consciousness, that no cerebral state is the equivalent of a perception.
spirit, not a No doubt the choice of perceptions from manifesto-..,.,, „, tion of among images in general is the effect of a discernment which foreshadows spirit. No doubt also the material universe itself, denned as the totality of images, is a kind of consciousness, a consciousness in which everything compensates and neutralizes everything else, a consciousness of which all the potential parts, balancing each other by a reaction which is always equal to the action, reciprocally hinder each other from stand ing out. But to touch the reality of spirit we must place ourselves at the point where an indi vidual consciousness, continuing and retaining the past in a present enriched by it, thus escapes the law of necessity, the law which ordains that the past shall ever follow itself in a present which merely repeats it in another form, and that all things shall ever be flowing away. When we pass from pure perception to memory, we definitely abandon matter for spirit.
VI. The theory of memory, around which the whole of our work centres, must be both the theoretic consequence and the experimental verification of our theory of pure perception. That the cerebral states which accompany per ception are neither its cause nor its duplicate, and that perception bears to its physiological counterpart the relation of a virtual action to an action begun — this we cannot substantiate by 314 MATTER AND MEMORY 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 ac tually 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 remem brance is the representation of an absent object. Here the two hypotheses must have opposite con sequences. 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 neces sary therefore, on this theory, that the remem brance 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 per