Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/39

 we shall discover in them a common postulate, which we may formulate thus: perception has a wholly speculative interest; it is pure knowledge. The whole discussion turns upon the importance to be attributed to this knowledge as compared with scientific knowledge. The one doctrine starts from the order required by science, and sees in perception only a confused and provisional science. The other puts perception in the first place, erects it into an absolute, and then holds science to be a symbolic expression of the real. But, for both parties, to perceive means above all to know.

Now it is just this postulate that we dispute. Even the most superficial examination of the structure of the nervous system in the animal series gives it the lie. And it is not possible to accept it without profoundly obscuring the threefold problem of matter, consciousness, and their relation.

For if we follow, step by step, the progress of external perception from the monera to the higher vertebrates, we find that living matter, even as a simple mass of protoplasm, is already irritable and contractile, that it is open to the influence of external stimulation, and answers to it by mechanical, physical, and chemical reactions. As we rise in the organic series, we find a division of physiological labour. Nerve cells