Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/176

 in this way the mechanism of interpretation, because of the invincible tendency which impels us to think on all occasions of things rather than of movements. We have said that we start from the idea, and that we develop it into auditory memory-images capable of inserting themselves in the motor diagram, so as to overlie the sounds we hear. We have here a continuous movement, by which the nebulosity of the idea is condensed into distinct auditory images, which, still fluid, will be finally solidified as they coalesce with the sounds materially perceivedperceived. [sic] At no moment is it possible to say with precision that the idea or the memory-image ends, that the memory-image or the sensation begins. And, in fact, where is the dividing line between the confusion of sounds perceived in the lump and the clearness which the remembered auditory images add to them, between the discontinuity of these remembered images themselves and the continuity of the original idea which they dissociate and refract into distinct words? But scientific thought, analysing this unbroken series of changes, and yielding to an irresistible need of symbolic presentment, arrests and solidifies into finished things the principal phases of this development. It erects the crude sounds heard into separate and complete words, then the remembered auditory images into entities independent of the idea they develop: these three terms, crude perception, auditory image