ception 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 recol lection of it which we summon up, but it cannot SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 315 give birth to that recollection. And as, on the other hand, our perception of the present object is something of that object itself, our representation of the absent object must be a phenomenon of quite another order than percep tion, since between presence and absence there are no degrees, no intermediate stages. Whence this double thesis, which is the opposite of the former: Memory is something other than a function of the brain, and there is not merely a difference of degree, but of kind, between perception and recollection. — The conflict between the two theories now takes an acute form; and this time experience can judge between them.
We will not here recapitulate in detail the proof we have tried to elaborate, but merely recall its essential points. All the arguments from fact, which may be invoked in favour of a probable accumulation of memories in the cortical substance, are drawn from localized disorders of memory. But, if recollections were really deposited in the brain, to definite gaps in memory characteristic le sions of the brain would correspond. Now, in those forms of amnesia in which a whole period of our past existence, for example, is abruptly and entirely obliterated from memory, we do not observe any precise cerebral lesion; and, on the contrary, in those disorders of memory where cerebral localization is distinct and certain, that is to say, in the different types of aphasia and in the diseases of visual or auditory recognition, we do not find that certain 3l6 MATTER AND MEMORY definite recollections are as it were torn from their seat, but that it is the whole faculty of remember ing that is more or less diminished in vitality, as if the subject had more or less difficulty in bringing his recollections into contact with the present situation. The mechanism of this con tact was, therefore, what we had to study in order to ascertain whether the office of the brain is not rather to ensure its working than to im prison the recollections in cells.
We were thus led to follow through its windings the progressive movement by which past and present come into contact with Recognition.,,,., each other, that is to say, the process of recognition. And we found, in fact, that the recognition of a present object might be effected in two absolutely different ways, but that in neither case did the brain act as a reservoir of images. Sometimes, by an entirely passive recog nition, rather acted than thought, the body re sponds to a perception that recurs by a move ment or attitude that has become automatic: in this case everything is explained by the motor apparatus which habit has set up in the body, and lesions of the memory may result from the destruction of these mechanisms. Sometimes, on the other hand, recognition is actively produced by memory-images which go out to meet the present perception; but then it is necessary that these recollections, at the moment that they over lie the perception, should be able to set going SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 317 in the brain the same machinery that percep tion ordinarily sets to work in order to produce actions; if not foredoomed to impotence, they will have no tendency to become actual. And this is why, in all cases where a lesion of the brain attacks a certain category of recollections, the affected recollections do not resemble each other by all belonging to the same period, for instance, or by any logical relationship to each other, but simply in that they are all auditive, or all visual, or all motor. That which is damaged appears to be the various sensorial or motor areas, or, more often still, those appendages which permit of their being set going from within the cortex, rather than the recollections themselves. We even went further, and by an attentive study of the recognition of words, as also of the phenomena of sensory apha sia, we endeavoured to prove that recognition is in no way effected by a mechanical awakening of memories that are asleep in the brain. It implies, on the contrary, a more or less high degree of ten sion in consciousness, which goes to fetch pure re collections in pure memory in order to materialize them progressively by contact with the present perception.
But what is this pure memory, what are pure recollections? By the answer to this enquiry we completed the demonstration of our thesis. We had just established its first point, that is to say, that memory is something other than a function of the brain. We had still to show, by the analysis 318 MATTER AND MEMORY of ' pure recollection/ that there is not between recollection and perception a mere difference of degree but a radical difference of kind.
VII. Let us point out to begin with the meta physical, and no longer merely psychological, bearing of this last problem. No doubt The different,..,,, planes of con- we have a thesis of pure psychology sciousness...,..
in a proposition such as this: recol lection is a weakened perception. But let there be no mistake: if recollection is only a weakened perception, inversely perception must be some thing like an intenser memory. Now the germ of English idealism is to be found here. This idealism consists in finding only a difference of degree, and not of kind, between the reality of the object perceived and the ideality of the object conceived. And the belief that we construct matter from our interior states and that per ception is only a true hallucination, also arises from this thesis. It is this belief that we have always combated whenever we have treated of matter. Either, then, our conception of matter is false, or memory is radically distinct from perception.
We have thus transposed a metaphysical prob lem so as to make it coincide with a psycho logical problem which direct observation is able to solve. How does psychology solve it? If the memory of a perception were but this perception weakened, it might happen to us, for instance, to take the perception of a slight sound for the recol- SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 319 lection of a loud noise. Now such a confusion never occurs. But we may go further, and say that the consciousness of a recollection never occurs as an actual weak state which we try to relegate to the past so soon as we become aware of its weakness. How, indeed, unless we already possessed the representation of a past previously lived, could we relegate to it the less intense psychical states, when it would be so simple to set them alongside of strong states as a present experience more confused beside a present exper ience more distinct? The truth is that memory does not consist in a regression from the present to the past, but, on the contrary, in a progress from the past to the present. It is in the past that we place ourselves at a stroke. We start from a * virtual state ' which we lead onwards, step by step, through a series of different planes of con sciousness, up to the goal where it is materialized in an actual perception; that is to say, up to the point where it becomes a present, active state; in fine, up to that extreme plane of our conscious ness against which our body stands out. In this virtual state pure memory consists.
How is it that the testimony of consciousness on this point is misunderstood? How is it that we make of recollection a weakened perception, of which it is impossible to say either why we relegate it to the past, how we rediscover its date, or by what right it reappears at one moment rather than at another? Simply because we forget the 320 MATTER AND MEMORY practical end of all our actual psychical states. Perception is made into a disinterested work of the mind, a pure contemplation. Then, as pure recol lection can evidently be only something of this kind (since it does not correspond to a present and urgent reality), memory and perception become states of the same nature, and between them no other difference than a difference of in tensity can be found. But the truth is that our present should not be denned as that which is more intense: it is that which acts on us and which makes us act, it is sensory and it is motor; — our present is, above all, the state of our body. Our past, on the contrary, is that which acts no longer but which might act, and will act by inserting itself into a present sensation of which it borrows the vitality. It is true that, from the moment when the recol lection actualizes itself in this manner, it ceases to be a recollection and becomes once more a perception.
We understand then why a remembrance can not be the result of a state of the brain. The state of the brain continues the remembrance; it gives it a hold on the present by the materiality which it confers upon it: but pure memory is a spiritual manifestation. With memory we are in very truth in the domain of spirit.
Association- VIIL lt WaS nOt OUr task tO ex~ tmmf plore this domain. Placed at the con- ideas, fluence of mind and matter, desirous SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 321 chiefly of seeing the one flow into the other, we had only to retain, of the spontaneity of intellect, its place of conjunction with bodily mechanism. In this way we were led to consider the phenomena of association and the birth of the simplest general ideas.
What is the cardinal error of associationism? It is to have set all recollections on the same plane, to have misunderstood the greater or less distance which separates them from the present bodily state, that is from action. Thus associationism is unable to explain either how the recollection clings to the perception which evokes it, or why association is effected by similarity or con tiguity rather than in any other way, or, finally, by what caprice a particular recollection is chosen among the thousand others which similarity or contiguity might equally well attach to the present perception. This means that associationism has mixed and confounded all the different planes of consciousness, and that it persists in regarding a less complete as a less complex recollection, whereas it is in reality a recollection less dreamed, more impersonal, nearer to action and therefore more capable of moulding itself — like a ready-made garment — upon the new character of the present situation. The opponents of associationism have, moreover, followed it on to this ground. They combat the theory because it explains the higher operations of the mind by association, but not because it misunderstands the true nature of y 322 MATTER AND MEMORY association itself. Yet this is the original vice of associationism.
Between the plane of action — the plane in which our body has condensed its past into motor habits, — and the plane of pure memory, where our mind retains in all its details the picture of our past life, we believe that we can discover thousands of different planes of consciousness, a thousand integral and yet diverse repetitions of the whole of the experience through which we have lived. To complete a recollection by more personal details does not at all consist in mechanically juxtaposing other recollections to this, but in transporting ourselves to a wider plane of consciousness, in going away from action in the direction of dream. Neither does the localizing of a recollection con sist in inserting it mechanically among other memories, but in describing, by an increasing expansion of the memory as a whole, a circle large enough to include this detail from the past. These planes, moreover, are not given as ready-made things superposed the one on the other. Rather they exist virtually, with that existence which is proper to things of the spirit. The intellect, for ever moving in the interval which separates them, unceasingly finds them again, or creates them anew: the life of intellect consists in this very movement. Then we understand why the laws of association are similarity and contiguity rather than any other laws, and why memory chooses among recollec tions which are similar or contiguous certain SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 323 images rather than other images, and, finally, how by the combined work of body and mind the earliest general ideas are formed. The interest of a living being lies in discovering in the present situation that which resembles a former situation, and then in placing alongside of that present situation what preceded and followed the previous one, in order to profit by past experience. Of all the associations which can be imagined, those of resemblance and contiguity are therefore at first the only associations that have a vital utility. But, in order to understand the mechanism of these associations and above all the apparently capricious selection which they make of mem ories, we must place ourselves alternately on the two extreme planes of consciousness which we have called the plane of action and the plane of dream. In the first are displayed only motor habits; these may be called associations which are acted or lived, rather than represented: here resemblance and contiguity are fused together, for analogous external situations, as they recur, have ended by connecting together certain bodily movements, and thenceforward the same auto matic reaction, in which we unfold these contiguous movements, will also draw from the situation which occasions them its resemblance with former situations. But, as we pass from movements to images and from poorer to richer images, resem blance and contiguity part company: they end by contrasting sharply with each other on that 324 MATTER AND MEMORY other extreme plane where no action is any longer affixed to the images. The choice of one resemblance among many, of one contig uity among others, is, therefore, not made at random: it depends on the ever varying de gree of the tension of memory, which, according to its tendency to insert itself in the present act or to withdraw from it, transposes itself as a whole from one key into another. And this double movement of memory between its two ex treme limits also sketches out, as we have shown, the first general ideas, — motor habits ascending to seek similar images in order to extract resemblances from them, and similar images coming down towards motor habits, to fuse themselves, for instance, in the automatic utterance of the word which makes them one. The nascent generality of the idea consists, then, in a certain activity of the mind, in a movement between action and representation. And this is why, as we have said, it will always be easy for a certain philosophy to localize the general idea at one of the two ex tremities, to make it crystallize into words or evaporate into memories, whereas it really consists in the transit of the mind as it passes from one term to the other.
IX. By representing elementary mental acti vity in this manner to ourselves, and by thus making of our body and all that sur- oi body rounds it the pointed end ever moving, ever driven into the future by the SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 325 weight of our past, we were able to confirm and illustrate what we had said of the function of the body, and at the same time to prepare the way for an approximation of body and mind.
For after having successively studied pure perception and pure memory, we still had to bring them together. If pure recollection is already spirit, and if pure perception is still in a sense matter, we ought to be able, by placing ourselves at their meeting place, to throw some light on the reciprocal action of spirit and matter. ' Pure,' that is to say instantaneous, perception is, in fact, only an ideal, an extreme. Every perception fills a certain depth of duration, prolongs the past into the present, and thereby partakes of memory. So that if we take perception in its concrete form, as a synthesis of pure memory and pure perception, that is to say of mind and matter, we compress within its narrowest limits the problem of the union of soul and body. This is the attempt we have made especially in the latter part of this essay.
The opposition of the two principles, in dualism in general, resolves itself into the threefold opposi tion of the inextended and the extended, quality and quantity, freedom and necessity. If our conception of the function of the body, if our analyses of pure perception and pure memory, are destined to throw light on any aspect of the correlation of body and mind, it can only be on condition of suppressing or toning down these 326 MATTER AND MEMORY three oppositions. We will, then, examine them in turn, presenting here in a more metaphysical form the conclusions which we have made a point of drawing from psychology alone.
ist. If we imagine on the one hand the extended really divided into corpuscles, for example, and on the other a consciousness with sen sations, in themselves inextensive, which come to project themselves into space, we shall evidently find nothing common to such matter and such a consciousness, to body and mind. But this opposition between perception and matter is the artificial work of an understanding which decomposes and recomposes according to its habits or its laws: it is not given in immediate intuition. What is given are not inextensive sen sations: how should they find their way back to space, choose a locality within it, and coordinate themselves there so as to build up an experience that is common to all men? And what is real is not extension, divided into independent parts: how, being deprived of all possible relationship to our consciousness, could it unfold a series of changes of which the relations and the order exactly correspond to the relations and the order of our representations? That which is given, that which is real, is something intermediate between divided extension and pure inexten- sion. It is what we have termed the extensive, Extensity is the most salient quality of percep tion. It is in consolidating and in subdividing SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 327 it by means of an abstract space, stretched by us beneath it for the needs of action, that we constitute the composite and infinitely divisible extension. It is, on the other hand, in subtilizing it, in making it, in turn, dissolve into affective sensations and evaporate into a counterfeit of pure ideas, that we obtain those inextensive sensations with which we afterwards vainly endeavour to reconstitute images. And the two opposite directions in which we pursue this double labour open quite naturally before us, because it is a result of the very necessities of action that extension should divide itself up for us into absolutely independent objects (whence an encouragement to go on subdividing extension); andthat we should pass by insensible degrees from affection to perception (whence a tendency to suppose perception more and more inextensive). But our understanding, of which the func tion is to set up logical distinctions, and con sequently clean-cut oppositions, throws itself into each of these ways in turn, and follows each to the end. It thus sets up, at one extremity, an infinitely divisible extension, at the other sensations which are absolutely inextensive. And it creates thereby the opposition which it after wards contemplates amazed.
2nd. Far less artificial is the opposition between quality and quantity, that is to say between consciousness and movement: but this Tension...opposition is radical only if we have 328 MATTER AND MEMORY already accepted the other. For if you suppose that the qualities of things are nothing but inex- tensive sensations affecting a consciousness, so that these qualities represent merely, as so many symbols, homogeneous and calculable changes going on in space, you must imagine be tween these sensations and these changes an incomprehensible correspondence. On the con trary, as soon as you give up establishing be tween them a priori this factitious contrariety, you see the barriers which seemed to separate them fall one after another. First, it is not true that consciousness, turned round on itself, is confronted with a merely internal procession of inextensive perceptions. It is inside the very things perceived that you put back pure percep tion, and the first obstacle is thus removed. You are confronted with a second, it is true: the homo geneous and calculable changes on which science works seem to belong to multiple and independent elements, such as atoms, of which these changes appear as mere accidents, and this multiplicity comes in between the perception and its object. But if the division of the extended is purely relative to our possible action upon it, the idea of independent corpuscles is a fortiori schematic and provisional. Science itself, moreover, allows us to discard it; and so the second barrier falls. A last interval remains to be over-leapt: that which separates the heterogeneity of qualities from the apparent homogeneity of movements that SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 329