Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/241

 limited at the point at which we choose to stop it. The necessities of life are no longer there to regulate the effect of similarity, and consequently of contiguity; and as, after all, everything resembles everything else, it follows that anything can be associated with anything. In the first case the present perception continued itself in determinate movements; now it melts into an infinity of memories, all equally possible. At AB association would provoke an arbitrary choice, and in S an inevitable deed.

But these are only two extreme limits, at which the psychologist must place himself alternately for convenience of study, and which are really never reached in practice. There is not, in man at least, a purely sensori-motor state, any more than there is in him an imaginative life without some slight activity beneath it. Our psychical life, as we have said, oscillates normally between these two extremes. On the one hand, the sensori-motor state S marks out the present direction of memory, being nothing else, in fact, than its actual and acting extremity; and on the other hand this memory itself, with the totality of our past, is continually pressing forward, so as to insert the largest possible part of itself into the present action. From this double effort result, at every moment, an infinite number of possible states of memory, states figured by the sections