Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/108



OF THE RECOGNITION OF IMAGES. MEMORY AND THE BRAIN.

pass now to the consideration of the consequences for the theory of memory, which might ensue from the acceptance of the principles we have laid down. We have said that the body, placed between the objects which act upon it and those which it influences, is only a conductor, the office of which is to receive movements, and to transmit them (when it does not arrest them) to certain motor mechanisms, determined if the action is reflex, chosen if the action is voluntary. Everything, then, must happen as if an independent memory gathered images as they successively occur along the course of time; and as if our body, together with its surroundings, was never more than one among these images, the last, that which we obtain at any moment by making an instantaneous section in the general stream of becoming. In this section our body occupies the centre. The things which surround it act upon it, and it reacts upon them. Its reactions are more or less complex, more or 86