Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/184

 it has even been produced experimentally in the monkey without determining anything but psychic deafness, that is to say, a loss of the power to interpret the sounds which it was still able to hear. So that we must attribute to perception and to memory separate nervous elements. But then this hypothesis will be contradicted by the most elementary psychological observation; for we see that a memory, as it becomes more distinct and more intense, tends to become a perception, though there is no precise moment at which a radical transformation takes place, nor consequently a moment when we can say that it moves forward from imaginative elements to sensory elements. Thus these two contrary hypotheses, the first identifying the elements of perception with the elements of memory, the second distinguishing them, are of such a nature that each sends us back to the other without allowing us to rest in either.

How should it be otherwise? Here again distinct perception and memory-image are taken in the static condition, as things of which the first is supposed to be already complete without the second; whereas we ought to consider the dynamic progress by which the one passes into the other.

For, on the one hand, complete perception is