Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/315

 consciousness where everything balances and compensates and neutralizes everything else; it possesses in very truth the indivisibility of our perception; so that, inversely, we may without scruple attribute to perception something of the extensity of matter. These two terms, perception and matter, approach each other in the measure that we divest ourselves of what may be called the prejudices of action: sensation recovers extensity, the concrete extended recovers its natural continuity and indivisibility. And homogeneous space, which stood between the two terms like an insurmountable barrier, is then seen to have no other reality than that of a diagram or a symbol. It interests the behaviour of a being which acts upon matter, but not the work of a mind which speculates on its essence.

Thereby also some light may be thrown upon the problem towards which all our enquiries converge, that of the union of body and soul. The obscurity of this problem, on the dualistic hypothesis, comes from the double fact that matter is considered as essentially divisible and every state of the soul as rigorously inextensive, so that from the outset the communication between the two terms is severed. And when we go more deeply into this double postulate, we discover, in regard to matter, a confusion of concrete and indivisible extensity with the divisible space which underlies it; and