Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/337

 give birth to that recollection. And as, on the other hand, our perception of the present object is something of that object itself, our representation of the absent object must be a phenomenon of quite another order than perception, since between presence and absence there are no degrees, no intermediate stages. Whence this double thesis, which is the opposite of the former: Memory is something other than a function of the brain, and there is not merely a difference of degree, but of kind, between perception and recollection.—The conflict between the two theories now takes an acute form; and this time experience can judge between them.

We will not here recapitulate in detail the proof we have tried to elaborate, but merely recall its essential points. All the arguments from fact, which may be invoked in favour of a probable accumulation of memories in the cortical substance, are drawn from localized disorders of memory. But, if recollections were really deposited in the brain, to definite gaps in memory characteristic lesions of the brain would correspond. Now, in those forms of amnesia in which a whole period of our past existence, for example, is abruptly and entirely obliterated from memory, we do not observe any precise cerebral lesion; and, on the contrary, in those disorders of memory where cerebral localization is distinct and certain, that is to say, in the different types of aphasia and in the diseases of visual or auditory recognition, we do not find that certain