CONTINUITY OF BERGSON'S THOUGHT l6l 



character. Hence though we act in accordance with natural laws, 

 these laws are largely what we are, or what we perceive them to be 

 because of our past. 



Perception gives us things as they are in themselves: it is not in 

 me but in them, and hence possesses extension as the warp and woof 

 of it. Perception is not to be considered as an inextended spiritual 

 fact. 



The vibrations my body receives from things prepare my body to 

 act on these things: it is an image like them. Perception therefore 

 consists in detaching from the totality of objects the possible action 

 of my body upon them. Perception appears then as only a choice. 

 Its function is largely to neglect in the total world all that I cannot act 

 upon. 



In using the word "images" then, Bergson concedes to idealism a 

 kinship between real things and consciousness. (But materialists 

 have to do this ultimately in a crude epiphenomenalism.) 



But our perception does not make or comprise the whole of the 

 world of reality; on the contrary, the purpose of a true science (and a 

 really useful and helpful metaphysics) is to give us more of that real 

 world of which our perception gives us a rude synthesis with most of 

 its links left out. 



Our World Comprises Only the Part We Can Act Upon 



Perception gives us a second-full of red light which for science 

 contains four hundred billions of vibrations (which it would take two 

 hundred and fifty centuries of our history to count, if we could con- 

 tinue counting so long at the absurdly high rate of five hundred to a 

 second). How can perception make the world if perception only 

 sketches the vaguest outline of the thing as it is in itself ? And yet 

 we may freely grant that the world as we know it is the result of the 

 selection made by pure perception of such aspects of reality as we 

 can use in action. 



My conscious perception has an entirely practical destination. 



My consciousness of matter is not subjective, for it is in things 

 rather than in me. It is not relative because the relation between the 



