Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/252

 ing scissions of sensibility and of motor activity. We cannot help seeing in these latter phenomena the real material substratum of the former. If it be true that our intellectual life rests, as a whole, upon its apex, that is to say upon the sensori-motor functions by which it inserts itself into present reality, intellectual equilibrium will be differently affected as these functions are damaged in one manner or in another. Now, besides the lesions which affect the general vitality of the sensori-motor functions, weakening or destroying what we have called the sense of reality, there are others which reveal themselves in a mechanical, not a dynamical, diminution of these functions, as if certain sensori-motor connexions merely parted company with the rest. If we are right in our hypothesis, memory is very differently affected in the two cases. In the first, no recollection is taken away, but all recollections are less ballasted, less solidly directed towards the real; whence arises a true disturbance of the mental equilibrium. In the second, the equilibrium is not destroyed, but it loses something of its complexity. Recollections retain their normal aspect, but forego a part of their solidarity, because their sensori-motor base, instead of being, so to speak, chemically changed, is mechanically diminished. But neither in the one case nor in the other are memories directly attacked or damaged.