Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/314

 perception, which coincides with its object, exists rather in theory than in fact: it could only happen if we were shut up within the present moment. In concrete perception memory intervenes, and the subjectivity of sensible qualities is due precisely to the fact that our consciousness, which begins by being only memory, prolongs a plurality of moments into each other, contracting them into a single intuition.

Consciousness and matter, body and soul, were thus seen to meet each other in perception. But in one aspect this idea remained for us obscure, because our perception, and consequently also our consciousness, seemed thus to snare in the divisibility which is attributed to matter. If, on the dualistic hypothesis, we naturally shrink from accepting the partial coincidence of the perceived object and the perceiving subject, it is because we are conscious of the undivided unity of our perception, whereas the object appears to us to be, in essence, infinitely divisible. Hence the hypothesis of a consciousness with inextensive sensations, placed over against an extended multiplicity. But if the divisibility of matter is entirely relative to our action thereon, that is to say to our faculty of modifying its aspect, if it belongs not to matter itself but to the space which we throw beneath this matter in order to bring it within our grasp, then the difficulty disappears. Extended matter, regarded as a whole, is like a