Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/76

 clude, from the gradual passage of affection to representation, that our representation of the material universe is relative and subjective, and that it has, so to speak, emerged from us, rather than that we have emerged from it.

Before criticizing this questionable interpretation of an unquestionable fact, we may show that it does not succeed in explaining, or even in throwing light upon, the nature either of pain or of perception. That affective states, essentially bound up with my personality, and vanishing if I disappear, should acquire extensity by losing intensity, should adopt a definite position in space, and build up a firm, solid experience, always in accord with itself and with the experience of other men—this is very difficult to realize. Whatever we do, we shall be forced to give back to sensations, in one form or another, first the extension and then the independence which we have tried to do without. But, what is more, affection, on this hypothesis, is hardly clearer than representation. For if it is not easy to see how affections, by diminishing in intensity, become representations, neither can we understand how the same phenomenon, which was given at first as perception, becomes affection by an increase of intensity. There is in pain something positive and active, which is ill explained by saying, as do some philosophers, that it consists in a confused representation. But still this is not the principal difficulty. That the gradual augmen-