Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/341

 lection of a loud noise. Now such a confusion never occurs. But we may go further, and say that the consciousness of a recollection never occurs as an actual weak state which we try to relegate to the past so soon as we become aware of its weakness. How, indeed, unless we already possessed the representation of a past previously lived, could we relegate to it the less intense psychical states, when it would be so simple to set them alongside of strong states as a present experience more confused beside a present experience more distinct? The truth is that memory does not consist in a regression from the present to the past, but, on the contrary, in a progress from the past to the present. It is in the past that we place ourselves at a stroke. We start from a 'virtual state' which we lead onwards, step by step, through a series of different planes of consciousness, up to the goal where it is materialized in an actual perception; that is to say, up to the point where it becomes a present, active state; in fine, up to that extreme plane of our consciousness against which our body stands out. In this virtual state pure memory consists.

How is it that the testimony of consciousness on this point is misunderstood? How is it that we make of recollection a weakened perception, of which it is impossible to say either why we relegate it to the past, how we rediscover its date, or by what right it reappears at one moment rather than at another? Simply because we forget the