Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/127

 Now the concrete process by which we grasp the past in the present is recognition. Recognition, therefore, is what we have to study, to begin with.

II. Of recognition in general: memory-images and movements.—There are two ways in which it is customary to explain the feeling of 'having seen a thing before.' On one theory, the recognition of a present perception consists in inserting it mentally in its former surroundings. I encounter a man for the first time: I simply perceive him. If I meet him again, I recognize him, in the sense that the concomitant circumstances of the original perception, returning to my mind, surround the actual image with a setting which is not a setting actually perceived. To recognize, then, according to this theory, is to associate with a present perception the images which were formerly given in connexion with it. —But, as it has been justly observed, a renewed perception cannot suggest the concomitant circumstances of the original perception unless the latter is evoked, to begin with, by the present state which resembles it. Let A be the first perception;