Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/81

 That is to say, once more, that my perception is outside my body, and my affection within it. Just as external objects are perceived by me where they are, in themselves and not in me, so my affective states are experienced there where they occur, that is, at a given point in my body. Consider the system of images which is called the material world. My body is one of them. Around this image is grouped the representation, i.e. its eventual influence on the others. Within it occurs affection, i.e. its actual effort upon itself. Such is indeed the fundamental difference which every one of us naturally makes between an image and a sensation. When we say that the image exists outside us, we signify by this that it is external to our body. When we speak of sensation as an internal state, we mean that it arises within in our body. And this is why we affirm that the totality of perceived images subsists, even if our body disappears, whereas we know that we cannot annihilate our body without destroying our sensations.

Hence we begin to see that we must correct, at least in this particular, our theory of pure perception. We have argued as though our perception were a part of the images, detached, as such, from their entirety; as though, expressing the virtual action of the object upon our body, or of our body upon the object, perception merely isolated from the total object that aspect of it which