Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/96

 extends to the theory of knowledge in general. We have said that the material world is made of objects, or, if you prefer it, of images, of which all the parts act and react upon each other by movements. And that which constitutes our pure perception is our dawning action, in so far as it is prefigured in those images. The actuality of our perception thus lies in its activity, in the movements which prolong it, and not in its greater intensity: the past is only idea, the present is ideo-motor. But this is what our opponents are determined not to see, because they regard perception as a kind of contemplation, attribute to it always a purely speculative end, and maintain that it seeks some strange disinterested knowledge; as though, by isolating it from action, and thus severing its links with the real, they were not rendering it both inexplicable and useless. But thenceforward all difference between perception and recollection is abolished, since the past is essentially that which acts no longer, and since, by misunderstanding this characteristic of the past, they become incapable of making a real distinction between it and the present, i.e. that which is acting. No difference but that of mere degree will remain between perception and memory; and neither in the one nor in the other will the subject be acknowledged to pass beyond himself.—Restore, on the contrary, the true character of perception; recognize in pure perception a