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 had chosen. Memory has then its successive and distinct degrees of tension or of vitality: they are certainly not easy to define, but the painter of mental scenery may not with impunity confound them. Pathology, moreover, here confirms—by means, it is true, of coarser examples—a truth of which we are all instinctively aware. In the 'systematized amnesias' of hysterical patients, for example, the recollections which appear to be abolished are really present; but they are probably all bound up with a certain determined tone of intellectual vitality in which the subject can no longer place himself.

Just as there are these different planes, infinite in number, for association by similarity, so there are with association by contiguity. In the extreme plane, which represents the base of memory, there is no recollection which is not linked by contiguity with the totality of the events which precede and also with those which follow it. Whereas, at the point in space where our action is concentrated, contiguity brings back, in the form of movement, only the reaction which immediately followed a former similar perception. As a matter of fact, every association by contiguity implies a position of the mind intermediate between the two extreme limits. If, here again, we imagine a number of possible repetitions of the totality of our memories, each of these copies of our past life must be supposed to be cut up, in its own