Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/131

 therefore, not enough for the recognition of a similar perception. Inversely, in Charcot's case, which has become the classic example of a complete eclipse of visual images, not all recognition of perceptions was obliterated. A careful study of the report of the case is conclusive on this point. No doubt the patient failed to recognize the streets and houses of his native town, to the extent of being unable to name them or to find his way about them; yet he knew that they were streets and houses. He no longer recognized his wife and children; yet, when he saw them, he could say that this was a woman, that those were children. None of this would have been possible, had there been psychic blindness in the absolute sense of the word. A certain kind of recognition, then, which we shall need to analyse, was obliterated, not the general faculty of recognition. So we must conclude, that not every recognition implies the intervention of a memory image; and, conversely, that we may still be able to call up such images when we have lost the power of identifying perceptions with them. What then is recognition, and how shall we define it?

There is, in the first place, if we carry the process to the extreme, an instantaneous recognition, of which the body is capable by itself, without the help of any explicit memory-image. It