Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/110

 sidered the unconscious, and shown where the fundamental distinction lies between the past and the present. But already we may speak of the body as an ever advancing boundary between the future and the past, as a pointed end, which our past is continually driving forward into our future. Whereas my body, taken at a single moment, is but a conductor interposed between the objects which influence it and those on which it acts, it is, on the other hand, when replaced in the flux of time, always situated at the very point where my past expires in a deed. And, consequently, those particular images which I call cerebral mechanisms terminate at each successive moment the series of my past representations, being the extreme prolongation of those representations into the present, their link with the real, that is, with action. Sever that link,—and you do not necessarily destroy the past image, but you deprive it of all means of acting upon the real and consequently, as we shall show, of being realized. It is in this sense, and in this sense only, that an injury to the brain can abolish any part of memory. Hence our third, and last, proposition:

III. ''We pass, by imperceptible stages, from recollections strung out along the course of time to the movements which indicate their nascent or possible action in space. Lesions of the brain may affect these movements, but not these recollections.''