CONTINUITY OF BERGSON'S THOUGHT 163 



But pure perception is not what we actually find in ourselves. In 

 order to explain experience as we have it, we must restore duration 

 (memory) and extension (matter). 



Our body is extended and capable of acting upon itself as well as 

 upon other bodies. Into our perception, then, something of our own 

 body must enter. Our relations with other images are distant and indi- 

 cate lessening degrees of action: our relation with our body reduces dis- 

 tance to nil, and action becomes not merely possible but real. Pain is an 

 actual effort to set the damaged part to rights. This is the meaning of 

 "affection." The surface of our body is the common limit within 

 which images and sensations arise together. 



The mistake is to think that sensation is inextended because of 

 this interiority. The old epistemology makes of these affective states 

 of our bodily sensations, inextended elements of consciousness, out of 

 which the external world is to be built up by magic in some unthink- 

 able manner; whereas we should start with the external world as 

 given, and these affective states are impurities introduced into this 

 image -world (of which the body is a part) by the ferment caused when 

 the external world and the body react on each other. 



But spirit is hardly found in perception and affection. There is 

 a kind of selective process in these. And again " no doubt the material 

 universe is a kind of consciousness." But in it there is a neutralizing 

 balance which hinders any one image from standing out. (Children 

 and animals accept the world and themselves.) 



"But to touch the reality of spirit we must place ourselves at a point 

 where an individual 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." 



Memory is spirit, not a manifestation of matter (as we have con- 

 ceived matter in perception). " When we pass from pure perception to 

 memory, we definitely abandon matter for spirit"; the material for the 

 psychic world. 



We cannot prove that perception is not the result {or the duplicate) of 



