Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/258

 from the second; but neither do we accept idealism, which holds that the second is constructed by the first. We maintain, as against materialism, that perception overflows infinitely the cerebral state; but we have endeavoured to establish, as against idealism, that matter goes in every direction beyond our representation of it, a representation which the mind has gathered out of it, so to speak, by an intelligent choice. Of these two opposite doctrines, the one attributes to the body and the other to the intellect a true power of creation, the first insisting that our brain begets representation and the second that our understanding designs the plan of nature. And against these two doctrines we invoke the same testimony, that of consciousness, which shows us our body as one image among others and our understanding as a certain faculty of dissociating, of distinguishing, of opposing logically, but not of creating or of constructing. Thus, willing captives of psychological analysis and consequently of common sense, it would seem that, after having exacerbated the conflicts raised by ordinary dualism, we have closed all the avenues of escape which metaphysic might set open to us.

But, just because we have pushed dualism to an extreme, our analysis has perhaps dissociated its contradictory elements. The theory of pure perception on the one hand, of pure memory on the other, may thus prepare the way for a reconcili-