Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/135

 its organized motor accompaniment, the ordinary feeling of recognition has its root in the consciousness of this organization.

In fact, we commonly act our recognition before we think it. Our daily life is spent among objects whose very presence invites us to play a part: in this the familiarity of their aspect consists. Motor tendencies would, then, be enough by themselves to give us the feeling of recognition. But we hasten to add that in most cases there is something else besides.

For, while motor apparatus are built up under the influence of perceptions that are analysed with increasing precision by the body, our past psychical life is there: it survives—as we shall try to prove—with all the detail of its events localized in time. Always inhibited by the practical and useful consciousness of the present moment, that is to say, by the sensori-motor equilibrium of a nervous system connecting perception with action, this memory merely awaits the occurrence of a rift between the actual impression and its corresponding movement to slip in its images. As a rule, when we desire to go back along the course of the past and discover the known, localized, personal memory-image which is related to the present, an effort is necessary, whereby we draw back from the act to which perception inclines us: the latter would urge us towards the future; we have to go backwards into the past. In this sense,