Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/152

 species which defines and absorbs the individual. There comes a moment when the recollection thus brought down is capable of blending so well with the present perception that we cannot say where perception ends or where memory begins. At that precise moment, memory, instead of capriciously sending in and calling back its images, follows regularly, in all their details, the movements of the body.

But, in the degree that these recollections draw nearer to movements, and so to external perception, the work of memory acquires a higher practical importance. Past images, reproduced exactly as they were, with all their details and even with their affective colouring, are the images of idle fancy or of dream: to act is just to induce this memory to shrink, or rather to become thinned and sharpened, so that it presents nothing thicker than the edge of a blade to actual experience, into which it will thus be able to penetrate. In truth, it is because psychology has failed to separate out the motor element in memory, that we have sometimes overlooked and sometimes exaggerated what is automatic in the evocation of remembrances. According to our view, an appeal is made to activity at the precise moment when perception gives rise to imitative movements which scan it, as it were, automatically. A sketch is thereby furnished to us, into which we put the right details and the right colouring by