Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/325

 pares. Do we consider perception? The growing complexity of the nervous system shunts the excitation received on to an ever larger variety of motor mechanisms, and so sketches out simultaneously an ever larger number of possible actions. Do we turn to memory? We note that its primary function is to evoke all those past perceptions which are analogous to the present perception, to recall to us what preceded and followed them, and so to suggest to us that decision which is the most useful. But this is not all. By allowing us to grasp in a single intuition multiple moments of duration, it frees us from the movement of the flow of things, that is to say, from the rhythm of necessity. The more of these moments memory can contract into one, the firmer is the hold which it gives to us on matter: so that the memory of a living being appears indeed to measure, above all, its powers of action upon things, and to be only the intellectual reverberation of this power. Let us start, then, from this energy, as from the true principle: let us suppose that the body is a centre of action, and only a centre of action. We must see what consequences thence result for perception, for memory, and for the relations between body and mind.

III. To take perception first. Here is my body with its 'perceptive centres.' These centres vibrate, and I have the representation of things. On the other hand I have supposed that these vibrations can