Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/154

 always diseases of the faculty of recognition; either of visual or auditory recognition in general (psychic blindness and deafness), or of the recognition of words (word blindness, word deafness, etc.). These disorders we have now to examine.

If our hypothesis is well founded, these failures of recognition are in no sense due to the fact that the recollections occupied the injured region of the brain. They must be due to one of two causes: sometimes our body is no longer able automatically to adopt, under the influence of the external stimulus, the precise attitude by means of which a choice could be automatically made among our memories; sometimes the memories are no longer able to find a fulcrum in the body, a means of prolonging themselves in action. In the first case, the lesion affects the mechanisms which continue, in an automatically executed movement, the stimulation received: attention can no longer be fixed by the object. In the second case, the lesion involves those particular cortical centres which prepare voluntary movements by lending them the required sensory antecedent, centres which, rightly or wrongly, are termed image-centres: attention can no longer be fixed by the subject. But, in either case, it is actual movements which are hindered or future movements which are no