CONTINUITY OF BERGSON'S THOUGHT 165 



(a) Sometimes the body (by an entirely passive recognition, rather 

 acted than thought) responds to a perception that recurs by a move- 

 ment or attitude that has become automatic. In this case habit 

 accounts for everything, and destruction of mechanism causes lesion 

 of memory. 



(b) Sometimes recognition is actively produced by memory-images 

 which go out to meet the present perceptions : but then it is necessary 

 that these recollections, at the moment they coincide with the per- 

 ception, should be able to set going in the brain the same machinery 

 that perception ordinarily sets to work in order to produce action. 

 And this is why in all cases where a lesion of the brain attacks a cer- 

 tain category of recollections, the affected recollections do not resemble 

 each other, by all belonging to the same period, or by any logical 

 relationship, but simply in that they are all auditive, or visual, or 

 motor. It is not memory that is damaged, but the contact between 

 the psychic and the material worlds. 



English idealism makes no difference in kind between perception 

 and memory; hence the external world is only "a true hallucination." 

 But memory is not a faded perception, otherwise faded perceptions would 

 seem memories; but they never do. 



If we had not already the idea of a past previously lived, how 

 could we ever assign an experience to it as a memory; and thus classify 

 weak perceptions not as weak perceptions, standing among other per- 

 ceptions, but as memories of the past. Memory is not a regression 

 from the present to the past, but an active and forcible invasion of the 

 present by the past. We place ourselves in the past at a stroke, and 

 summon recollections to play upon the inner keyboard of the brain, so 

 as to modify actions, prepared by the playing on the outer keyboard of 

 perception. Memory and perception are contraries. We start from a 

 virtual state of pure memory and pass through several planes of 

 consciousness to action. 



The old psychology and metaphysics made perception a disin- 

 terested work of mind, and then made memory a state of the same 

 nature ; but perception is for action; our present is sensory and it is 

 motor; it is the state of our body; but our memory is in very truth 



