Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/317

 and can be nothing but disguised statements of the fact,—the idea of a parallelism or of a pre-established harmony. But hence also the impossibility of constituting either a psychology of memory or a metaphysic of matter. We have striven to show that this psychology and this metaphysic are bound up with each other, and that the difficulties are less formidable in a dualism which, starting from pure perception, where subject and object coincide, follows the development of the two terms in their respective durations,—matter, the further we push its analysis, tending more and more to be only a succession of infinitely rapid moments which may be deduced each from the other and thereby are equivalent to each other; spirit being in perception already memory, and declaring itself more and more as a prolonging of the past into the present, a progress, a true evolution.

But does the relation of body and mind become thereby clearer? We substitute a temporal for a spatial distinction: are the two terms any the more able to unite? It must be observed that the first distinction does not admit of degree: matter is supposed to be in space, spirit to be extra-spatial; there is no possible transition between them. But if, in fact, the humblest function of spirit is to bind together the successive moments of the duration of things, if it is by this that it comes into contact with matter and by this also that it is first