Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/233

 anything more than the two extremities between which it oscillates; it makes the general idea coincide sometimes with the action which manifests it or the word which expresses it, and at other times with the multitudinous images, unlimited in number, which are its equivalent in memory. But the truth is that the general idea escapes us as soon as we try to fix it at either of the two extremities. It consists in the double current which goes from the one to the other,—always ready either to crystallize into uttered words or to evaporate into memories.

This amounts to saying that between the sensori-motor mechanisms figured by the point S and the totality of the memories disposed in AB there is room, as we indicated in the preceding chapter, for a thousand repetitions of our psychical life, figured by as many sections A′B′, A″B″, etc., of the same cone. We tend to scatter ourselves over AB in the measure that we detach ourselves from our sensory and motor state to live in the life of dreams; we tend to concentrate ourselves in S in the measure that we attach ourselves more firmly to the present reality,