Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/335

 epiphenomenal consciousness, that no cerebral state is the equivalent of a perception. No doubt the choice of perceptions from among images in general is the effect of a discernment which foreshadows spirit. No doubt also the material universe itself, defined as the totality of images, is a kind of consciousness, a consciousness in which everything compensates and neutralizes everything else, a consciousness of which all the potential parts, balancing each other by a reaction which is always equal to the action, reciprocally hinder each other from standing out. But to touch the reality of spirit we must place ourselves at the point where an individual consciousness, continuing and retaining the past in a present enriched by it, thus escapes the law of necessity, the law which ordains that the past shall ever follow itself in a present which merely repeats it in another form, and that all things shall ever be flowing away. When we pass from pure perception to memory, we definitely abandon matter for spirit.

VI. The theory of memory, around which the whole of our work centres, must be both the theoretic consequence and the experimental verification of our theory of pure perception. That the cerebral states which accompany perception are neither its cause nor its duplicate, and that perception bears to its physiological counterpart the relation of a virtual action to an action begun—this we cannot substantiate by