Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/239

 ment, we shall see, is the result of the fundamental needs of life; and we shall also see why the 'associations,' which we appear to form in the course of this movement, correspond to all the possible degrees of so-called contiguity and resemblance.

Let us, for a moment, suppose our psychical life reduced to sensori-motor functions alone. In other words, suppose ourselves placed in the diagrammatic at the point S, which corresponds to the greatest possible simplification of our mental life. In this state every perception spontaneously prolongs itself into appropriate reactions; for analogous former perceptions have set up more or less complex motor apparatus, which only await a recurrence of the same appeal in order to enter into play. Now there is, in this mechanism, an association of similarity, since the present perception acts in virtue of its likeness to past perceptions; and there is also an association of contiguity, since the movements which followed those former perceptions reproduce themselves, and may even bring in their train a vast number of actions co-ordinate with the first. Here then we seize association of similarity and association of contiguity at their very source, and at a point where they are almost confounded in one—not indeed thought, but acted and lived. They are not contingent forms of our psychical