Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/292

 state of our consciousness and a reality independent of ourselves. This mixed character of our immediate perception, this appearance of a realized contradiction, is the principal theoretical reason that we have for believing in an external world which does not coincide absolutely with our perception. As it is overlooked in the doctrine that regards sensation as entirely heterogeneous with movements, of which sensation is then supposed to be only a translation into the language of consciousness, this doctrine ought, it would seem, to confine itself to sensations, which it had indeed begun by setting up as the actual data, and not add to them movements which, having no possible contact with them, are no longer anything but their useless duplicate. Realism, so understood, is self-destructive. Indeed, we have no choice: if our belief in a more or less homogeneous substratum of sensible qualities has any ground, this can only be found in an act which makes us seize or divine, in quality itself, something which goes beyond sensation, as if this sensation itself were pregnant with details suspected yet unperceived. Its objectivity—that is to say, what it contains over and above what it yields up—must then consist, as we have foreshadowed, precisely in the immense multiplicity of the movements which it executes, so to speak, within itself as a chrysalis. Motionless on the surface, in its very depth it lives and vibrates.

As a matter of fact, no one represents to himself