Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/228

 equally remote from generality fully conceived and from individuality clearly perceived, begets them both by a process of dissociation. Reflective analysis clarifies it into the general idea; discriminative memory solidifies it into a perception of the individual.

But this will be more clearly evident if we go back to the purely utilitarian origin of our perception of things. That which interests us in a given situation, that which we are likely to grasp in it first, is the side by which it can respond to a tendency or a need. But a need goes straight to the resemblance or quality; it cares little for individual differences. To this discernment of the useful we may surmise that the perception of animals is, in most cases, confined. It is grass in general which attracts the herbivorous animal: the colour and the smell of grass, felt and experienced as forces, (we do not go so far as to say, thought as qualities or genera) are the sole immediate data of its external perception. On this background of generality or of resemblance the animal's memory may show up contrasts from which will issue differentiations; it will then distinguish one countryside from another, one field from another field; but this is, we repeat, the superfluity of perception, not a necessary part. It may be urged that we are only throwing the problem further back, that we are merely relegating to the unconscious the process by which similarity