Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/319

 tween spirit and body in terms of space, body and spirit are like two railway lines which cut each other at a right angle; on the second, the rails come together in a curve, so that we pass insensibly from the one to the other.

But have we here anything but a metaphor? Does not a marked distinction, an irreducible opposition, remain between matter properly so-called and the lowest degree of freedom or of memory? Yes, no doubt, the distinction subsists, but union becomes possible, since it would be given, under the radical form of a partial coincidence, in pure perception. The difficulties of ordinary dualism come, not from the distinction of the two terms, but from the impossibility of seeing how the one is grafted upon the other. Now, as we have shown, pure perception, which is the lowest degree of mind,—mind without memory—is really part of matter, as we understand matter. We may go further: memory does not intervene as a function of which matter has no presentiment and which it does not imitate in its own way. If matter does not remember the past, it is because it repeats the past unceasingly, because, subject to necessity, it unfolds a series of moments of which each is the equivalent of the preceding moment and may be deduced from it: thus its past is truly given in its present. But a being which evolves more or less freely creates something new every moment: in vain, then, should we seek to read its past in its present