Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/142

 would affect our nascent or possible action, but our action alone. Sometimes they would hinder the body from taking, in regard to the object, the attitude that may call back its memory-image; sometimes they would sever the bonds between remembrance and the present reality; that is, by suppressing the last phase of the realization of a memory—the phase of action—they would thereby hinder the memory from becoming actual. But in neither case would a lesion of the brain really destroy memories.

The second hypothesis is ours; but, before we attempt to verify it, we must briefly state how we understand the general relations of perception, attention and memory. In order to show how a memory may, by gradual stages, come to graft itself on an attitude or a movement, we shall have to anticipate in some degree the conclusions of our next chapter.

What is attention? In one point of view the essential effect of attention is to render perception more intense, and to spread out its details; regarded in its content, it would resolve itself into a certain magnifying of the intellectual state. But, on the other hand, consciousness testifies to an irreducible difference of form between