Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/251

 disturbance may be enough to create a sort of psychic vertigo, and so cause memory and attention to lose contact with reality. If we read the descriptions given by some mad patients of the beginning of their malady, we find that they often feel a sensation of strangeness, or, as they say, of 'unreality,' as if the things they perceived had for them lost solidity and relief. If our analyses are correct, the concrete feeling that we have of present reality consists, in fact, of our consciousness of the actual movements whereby our organism is naturally responding to stimulation; so that where the connecting links between sensations and movements are slackened or tangled, the sense of the real grows weaker or disappears.

There are here, moreover, many distinctions to be made, not only between the various forms of insanity, but also between insanity properly so-called and that division of the personality which recent psychology has so ingeniously compared with it. In these diseases of personality it seems that groups of recollections detach themselves from the central memory and forego their solidarity with the others. But, then, it seldom occurs that the patient does not also display accompany-