Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/339

 in the brain the same machinery that perception ordinarily sets to work in order to produce actions; if not foredoomed to impotence, they will have no tendency to become actual. And this is why, in all cases where a lesion of the brain attacks a certain category of recollections, the affected recollections do not resemble each other by all belonging to the same period, for instance, or by any logical relationship to each other, but simply in that they are all auditive, or all visual, or all motor. That which is damaged appears to be the various sensorial or motor areas, or, more often still, those appendages which permit of their being set going from within the cortex, rather than the recollections themselves. We even went further, and by an attentive study of the recognition of words, as also of the phenomena of sensory aphasia, we endeavoured to prove that recognition is in no way effected by a mechanical awakening of memories that are asleep in the brain. It implies, on the contrary, a more or less high degree of tension in consciousness, which goes to fetch pure recollections in pure memory in order to materialize them progressively by contact with the present perception.

But what is this pure memory, what are pure recollections? By the answer to this enquiry we completed the demonstration of our thesis. We had just established its first point, that is to say, that memory is something other than a function of the brain. We had still to show, by the analysis