Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - Henri Bergson - Personalist (The Philosophical Review, 1912-11-01).pdf/5

Rh this continuity, and then defining still other bodies with which the first will enter into relations as if with persons.”

(c) Bergson’s theory of the relation of mind to body must be interpreted in accordance with this teaching about things and quantities. When he says that “the essential function of the body is … to limit the life of the spirit,” the statement must be read in the light of his invariable assertion that body, nerves, and brain are images. Somewhat to expand this summary statement: Bergson teaches that the body is a ‘privileged image’ in that I am conscious of it both through affection (organic sensation) and through perception (spatial perception). But he opposes with special vigor the materialistic doctrine that the brain is cause of consciousness, and he argues in great detail that for memory (in the sense of recognition) there is no adequate cerebral explanation. The body, he teaches, is best conceived as conductor of motions, a link between me and the other images which environ me, a “rendezvous between excitations received and movements accomplished.” Occasionally Bergson expresses this relation by calling the body a “center of action”; but this, as he acknowledges, is an inexact expression. Really, as he says, my body is but the symbol of ‘the real center of action’; and this real center of action is the self or ‘person.’ “My body,” he definitely states, “has its position as center of [my] percepts; my personality (ma personne), is the being to which I must relate [my] actions. The body, and in particular the brain, is thus