Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/236

 bear to the activity of the will. If memories move about, indifferent, in a consciousness that is both lifeless and shapeless, there is no reason why the present perception should prefer and attract any one of them: we can only, in that case, note the conjunction when once it has taken place and speak of similarity or of contiguity,—which is merely, at bottom, to express in vague terms that our mental states have affinities for one another.

But even of this affinity, which takes the double form of contiguity and of similarity, associationism can furnish no explanation. The general tendency to associate remains as obscure for us, if we adhere to this doctrine, as the particular forms of association. Having stiffened individual memory-images into ready-made things, given cut and dry in the course of our mental life, associationism is reduced to bringing in, between these objects, mysterious attractions of which it is not even possible to say beforehand, as of physical attraction, by what effects they will manifest themselves. For why should an image which is, by hypothesis, self-sufficient, seek to accrue to itself others either similar or given in contiguity with it? The truth is that this independent image is a late and artificial product of the mind. In fact, we perceive the resemblance before we perceive the individuals which resemble each other; and, in an aggregate of contiguous parts, we perceive the whole before the parts. We go on from