Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/93

 ing a better light on our decision, it supplants the real intuition of which the office is then merely—we shall prove it later—to call up the recollection, to give it a body, to render it active and thereby actual. We had every right, then, to say that the coincidence of perception with the object perceived exists in theory rather than in fact. We must take into account that perception ends by being merely an occasion for remembering, that we measure in practice the degree of reality by the degree of utility, and, finally, that it is our interest to regard as mere signs of the real those immediate intuitions which are, in fact, part and parcel with reality. But here we discover the mistake of those who say that to perceive is to project externally unextended sensations which have been drawn from our own depths, and then to develop them in space. They have no difficulty in showing that our complete perception is filled with images which belong to us personally, with exteriorized (that is to say recollected) images; but they forget that an impersonal basis remains in which perception coincides with the object perceived; and which is, in fact, externality itself.

The capital error, the error which, passing over from psychology into metaphysic, shuts us out in the end from the knowledge both of body and of spirit, is that which sees only a difference of intensity, instead of a difference of nature, between pure