Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/347

 weight of our past, we were able to confirm and illustrate what we had said of the function of the body, and at the same time to prepare the way for an approximation of body and mind.

For after having successively studied pure perception and pure memory, we still had to bring them together. If pure recollection is already spirit, and if pure perception is still in a sense matter, we ought to be able, by placing ourselves at their meeting place, to throw some light on the reciprocal action of spirit and matter. 'Pure,' that is to say instantaneous, perception is, in fact, only an ideal, an extreme. Every perception fills a certain depth of duration, prolongs the past into the present, and thereby partakes of memory. So that if we take perception in its concrete form, as a synthesis of pure memory and pure perception, that is to say of mind and matter, we compress within its narrowest limits the problem of the union of soul and body. This is the attempt we have made especially in the latter part of this essay.

The opposition of the two principles, in dualism in general, resolves itself into the threefold opposition of the inextended and the extended, quality and quantity, freedom and necessity. If our conception of the function of the body, if our analyses of pure perception and pure memory, are destined to throw light on any aspect of the correlation of body and mind, it can only be on condition of suppressing or toning down these