Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/326

 neither produce nor translate my perception. It is, then, outside them. Where is it? I cannot hesitate as to the answer: positing my body, I posit a certain image, but with it also the aggregate of the other images, since there is no material image which does not owe its qualities, its determinations, in short its existence, to the place which it occupies in the totality of the universe. My perception can, then, only be some part of these objects themselves; it is in them rather than they in it. But what is it exactly within them? I see that my perception appears to follow all the vibratory detail of the so-called sensitive nerves; and on the other hand I know that the rôle of their vibrations is solely to prepare the reaction of my body on neighbouring bodies, to sketch out my virtual actions. Perception, therefore, consists in detaching, from the totality of objects, the possible action of my body upon them. Perception appears, then, as only a choice. It creates nothing; its office, on the contrary, is to eliminate from the totality of images all those on which I can have no hold, and then, from each of those which I retain, all that does not concern the needs of the image which I call my body. Such is, at least, much simplified, the way we explain or describe schematically what we have called pure perception. Let us mark out at once the intermediate place which we thus take up between realism and idealism.

That every reality has a kinship, an analogy,