Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/342

 practical end of all our actual psychical states. Perception is made into a disinterested work of the mind, a pure contemplation. Then, as pure recollection can evidently be only something of this kind (since it does not correspond to a present and urgent reality), memory and perception become states of the same nature, and between them no other difference than a difference of intensity can be found. But the truth is that our present should not be defined as that which is more intense: it is that which acts on us and which makes us act, it is sensory and it is motor;—our present is, above all, the state of our body. Our past, on the contrary, is that which acts no longer but which might act, and will act by inserting itself into a present sensation of which it borrows the vitality. It is true that, from the moment when the recollection actualizes itself in this manner, it ceases to be a recollection and becomes once more a perception.

We understand then why a remembrance cannot be the result of a state of the brain. The state of the brain continues the remembrance; it gives it a hold on the present by the materiality which it confers upon it: but pure memory is a spiritual manifestation. With memory we are in very truth in the domain of spirit.

VIII. It was not our task to explore this domain. Placed at the confluence of mind and matter, desirous