Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/175

 initial. —Therefore, in facts of the second kind, it is the function that is attacked as a whole, and in those of the first kind the forgetting, though in appearance more complete, is never really final. Neither in the one case nor in the other do we find memories localized in certain cells of the cerebral substance and abolished by their destruction.

But let us question our own consciousness, and ask of it what happens when we listen to the words of another person with the desire to understand them. Do we passively wait for the impressions to go in search of their images? Do we not rather feel that we are adopting a certain disposition which varies with our interlocutor, with the language he speaks, with the nature of the ideas which he expresses,—and varies, above all, with the general movement of his phrase, as though we were choosing the key in which our own intellect is called upon to play? The motor diagram, emphasizing his utterance, following through all its windings the curve of his thought, shows our thought the road. It is the empty vessel, which determines, by its form, the form which the fluid mass, rushing into it, already tends to take.

But psychologists may be unwilling to explain