Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/155

 longer prepared: there has been no destruction of memories.

Now pathology confirms this forecast. It rereveals to us two absolutely distinct kinds of psychic blindness and deafness, and of word blindness and deafness. In the first kind, visual and auditory memories are still evoked, but they cannot apply themselves to the corresponding perceptions. In the second, evocation of the memories themselves is hindered. Is it true that the lesion involves, as we said, the sensori-motor mechanisms of automatic attention in the first case, and the imaginative mechanisms of voluntary attention in the second? In order to verify our hypothesis, we must limit demonstration to a definite example. No doubt we could show that visual recognition of things in general, and of words in particular, implies a semi-automatic motor process to begin with, and then an active projection of memories which engraft themselves on the corresponding attitudes. But we prefer to confine ourselves to impressions of hearing, and more particularly to the hearing of articulate language, because this example is the most comprehensive. To hear speech is, in fact, first of all to recognize a sound, then to discover its sense, and finally to interpret it more or less thoroughly: in short, it is to pass through all the stages of attention and to exercise several higher or lower powers of memory. Moreover, no disorders are more common or better studied than those of the auditive memory of