Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/348

 three oppositions. We will, then, examine them in turn, presenting here in a more metaphysical form the conclusions which we have made a point of drawing from psychology alone.

1st. If we imagine on the one hand the extended really divided into corpuscles, for example, and on the other a consciousness with sensations, in themselves inextensive, which come to project themselves into space, we shall evidently find nothing common to such matter and such a consciousness, to body and mind. But this opposition between perception and matter is the artificial work of an understanding which decomposes and recomposes according to its habits or its laws: it is not given in immediate intuition. What is given are not inextensive sensations: how should they find their way back to space, choose a locality within it, and coördinate themselves there so as to build up an experience that is common to all men? And what is real is not extension, divided into independent parts: how, being deprived of all possible relationship to our consciousness, could it unfold a series of changes of which the relations and the order exactly correspond to the relations and the order of our representations? That which is given, that which is real, is something intermediate between divided extension and pure inextension. It is what we have termed the extensive. Extensity is the most salient quality of perception. It is in consolidating and in subdividing