Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/182

 intellect to cut up all progress into phases and afterwards to solidify these phases into things; and since it is born a priori from a kind of metaphysical prepossession, it has neither the advantage of following the movement of consciousness nor that of simplifying the explanation of the facts.

But we must follow this illusion up to the point where it issues in a manifest contradiction. We have said that ideas,—pure recollections summoned from the depths of memory,—develop into memory-images more and more capable of inserting themselves into the motor diagram. In the degree that these recollections take the form of a more complete, more concrete and more conscious representation, do they tend to confound themselves with the perception which attracts them or of which they adopt the outline. Therefore there is not, there cannot be in the brain a region in which memories congeal and accumulate. The alleged destruction of memories by an injury to the brain is but a break in the continuous progress by which they actualize themselves. And, consequently, if we insist on localizing the auditory memory of words, for instance, in a given part of the brain, we shall be led by equally cogent reasons to distinguish this image-centre from the perceptive centre or to confound the two in one. Now this is just what experience teaches.

For notice the strange contradiction to which