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 definite recollections are as it were torn from their seat, but that it is the whole faculty of remembering that is more or less diminished in vitality, as if the subject had more or less difficulty in bringing his recollections into contact with the present situation. The mechanism of this contact was, therefore, what we had to study in order to ascertain whether the office of the brain is not rather to ensure its working than to imprison the recollections in cells.

We were thus led to follow through its windings the progressive movement by which past and present come into contact with each other, that is to say, the process of recognition. And we found, in fact, that the recognition of a present object might be effected in two absolutely different ways, but that in neither case did the brain act as a reservoir of images. Sometimes, by an entirely passive recognition, rather acted than thought, the body responds to a perception that recurs by a movement or attitude that has become automatic: in this case everything is explained by the motor apparatus which habit has set up in the body, and lesions of the memory may result from the destruction of these mechanisms. Sometimes, on the other hand, recognition is actively produced by memory-images which go out to meet the present perception; but then it is necessary that these recollections, at the moment that they overlie the perception, should be able to set going