Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/231

 the expression, a similarity which is automatically acted. That to which it returns is a similarity intelligently perceived, or thought. And it is precisely in the course of this progress that are built up, by the double effort of the understanding and of the memory, the perception of individuals and the conception of genera,—memory grafting distinctions upon resemblances which have been spontaneously abstracted, the understanding disengaging from the habit of resemblances the clear idea of generality. This idea of generality was, in the beginning, only our consciousness of a likeness of attitude in a diversity of situations; it was habit itself, mounting from the sphere of movement to that of thought. But from genera so sketched out mechanically by habit we have passed, by an effort of reflexion upon this very process, to the general idea of genus; and when that idea has been once constituted, we have constructed (this time voluntarily) an unlimited number of general notions. It is not necessary here to follow the intellect into the detail of this construction. It is enough to say that the understanding, imitating the effort of nature, has also set up motor apparatuses, artificial in this case, to make a limited number of them answer to an unlimited number of individual objects: the assemblage of these mechanisms is articulate speech.

Yet these two divergent operations of the mind, the one by which it discerns individuals, the other by which it constructs genera, are far from demand-