Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/167

 similar words pronounced on different notes and by different qualities of voice? These inner movements of repeating and recognizing are like a prelude to voluntary attention. They mark the limit between the voluntary and the automatic. By them, as we hinted before, the characteristic phenomena of intellectual recognition are first prepared and then determined. But what is this complete and fully conscious recognition?

2. We come to the second part of our subject: from movements we pass to memories. We have said that attentive recognition is a kind of circuit, in which the external object yields to us deeper and deeper parts of itself, as our memory adopts a correspondingly higher degree of tension in order to project recollections towards it. In the particular case we are now considering, the object is an interlocutor whose ideas develop within his consciousness into auditory representations which are then materialized into uttered words. So, if we are right, the hearer places himself at once in the midst of the corresponding ideas, and then develops them into acoustic memories which go out to overlie the crude sounds perceived, while fitting themselves into the motor diagram. To follow an arithmetical addition is to do it over again for ourselves. To understand another's words is, in like manner, to reconstruct intelli-