Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/160

 teaches what is the essential; it points out, one after another, within the total movement, the lines that mark off its internal structure. In this sense, a movement is learnt when the body has been made to understand it.

So a motor accompaniment of speech may well break the continuity of the mass of sound. But we have now to point out in what this accompaniment consists. Is it speech itself, repeated internally? If this were so, the child would be able to repeat all the words that its ear can distinguish; and we ourselves should only need to understand a foreign language to be able to pronounce it with a correct accent. The matter is far from being so simple. I may be able to catch a tune, to follow its phrasing, even to fix it in memory, without being able to sing it. I can easily distinguish the peculiarities of inflexion and tone in an Englishman speaking German—I correct him therefore, mentally;—but it by no means follows that I could give the right inflexion and tone to the German phrase, if I were to utter it. Here, moreover, the observation of every-day life is confirmed by clinical facts. It is still possible to follow and understand speech when one has become incapable of speaking. Motor aphasia does not involve word deafness.

This is because the diagram, by means of which we divide up the speech we hear, indicates only its salient outlines. It is to speech itself what