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vibrations have taken place, of which the first is separated from the last by an interval which is enormously
divided. Your perception, however instantaneous, consists then in an incalculable multitude of remembered
elements; and in truth every perception is already memory. Practically zee perceive only the past, the pure
present being the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future.
Consciousness, then, illumines, at each moment of time, that immediate part of the past which, impending
over the future, seeks to realize and to associate with it. Solely preoccupied in thus determining an
undetermined future, consciousness may shed a little of its light on those of our states, more remote in the
past, which can be usefully combined with our present state, that is to say, with our immediate past : the
rest remains in the dark. It is in this illuminated part of our history that we remain seated, in virtue of the
fundamental law of life, which is a law of action: hence the difficulty we experience in conceiving
memories which are preserved in the shadow. Our reluctance to admit the integral survival of the past has
its origin, then, in the very bent of our psychical life,-an unfolding of states wherein our interest prompts us
to look at that which is unrolling, and not at that which is entirely unrolled.
(195)
The two memories and
So we return, after a long digression, to our point of departure. There are, we have said, two memories
their interplay. Each
which are profoundly distinct : the one, fixed in the organism, is nothing else but the complete set of
borrows from and
intelligently constructed mechanisms which ensure the appropriate reply to the various possible demands.
supports the other.
This memory enables us to adapt ourselves to the present situation ; through it the actions to which we are
subject prolong themselves into reactions that are sometimes accomplished, sometimes merely nascent, but
always more or less appropriate. Habit rather than memory, it acts our past experience but does not call up
its image. The other is the true memory. Co-extensive with consciousness, it retains and ranges alongside
of each other all our states in the order in which they occur, leaving to each fact its place and consequently
marking its date, truly moving in the past and not, like the first, in an ever renewed present. But, in marking
the profound distinction between these two forms of memory, we have not shown their connecting link.
Above the body, with its mechanisms which symbolize the accumulated effort of past actions, the memory
which imagines and repeats has been left to hang, as it were, suspended in the void. Now, if it be true that
we never perceive anything but our immediate past, if our consciousness of the present is already memory,
the two terms
(196) which had been separated to begin with cohere closely
together. Seen from this new point of view, indeed, our body is
nothing but that part of our representation which is ever being
born again, the part always present, or rather that which at each
moment is just past. Itself an image, the body cannot store up
images, since it forms a part of the images; and this is why it is a
chimerical enterprise to seek to localize past or even present
perceptions in the brain : they are not in it; it is the brain that is in
them. But this special image which persists in the midst of the
others, and which I call my body, constitutes at every moment, as
we have said, a section of the universal becoming. It is then the
place of passage of the movements received and thrown back, a
hyphen, a connecting link between the things which act upon me
and the things upon which I act,-the seat, in a word, of the
sensori-motor phenomena. If I represent by a cone SAB the totality of the recollections accumulated in my
memory, the base AB, situated in the past, remains motionless, while the summit S, which indicates at all
times my present, moves forward unceasingly, and unceasingly also touches the moving plane P of my
actual representation of the universe. At S the image of the body is concentrated ; and, since it belongs to
the plane P, this image sloes but receive and restore actions emanating from all the images of which the
plane is composed.
(197) The bodily memory, made up of the sum of the sensori-motor systems organized by habit, is then a
quasi-instantaneous memory to which the true memory of the past serves as base. Since they are not two
separate things, since the first is only, as we have said, the pointed end, ever moving, inserted by the
second in the shifting plane of experience, it is natural that the two functions should lend each other a
mutual support. So, on the one hand, the memory of the past offers to the sensori-motor mechanisms all the
recollections capable of guiding them in their task and of giving to the motor reaction the direction
suggested by the lessons of experience. It is in just this that the associations of contiguity and likeness
consist. But, on the other hand, the sensori-motor apparatus furnish to ineffective, that is unconscious,
memories, the means of taking on a body, of materializing themselves, in short of becoming present. For,
that a recollection should reappear in consciousness, it is necessary that it should descend from the heights
of pure memory down to the precise point where action is taking place. In other words, it is from the
present that comes the appeal to which memory responds, and it is from the sensori-motor elements of
present action that a memory borrows the warmth which gives it life.
'Good sense' consists
(198) Is it not by the constancy of this agreement, by the precision with which these two complementary
mainly in making the
memories insert themselves each into the other, that we recognize a well-balanced ' mind, that is to say, in
fact, a man nicely adapted to life ? The characteristic of the man of action is the promptitude with which he right use of
spontaneous memory
summons to the help of a given situation all toe memories which have reference to it ; but it is also the
insurmountable barrier which encounter, when they present themselves on the threshold of his
consciousness, memories that are useless or indifferent. To live only in the present, to respond to a stimulus
by the immediate reaction which prolongs it, is the mark of the lower animals the man who proceeds in this
way is a man of impulse. But he who lives in the past for the mere pleasure of living there, and in whom
recollections emerge into the light of consciousness without any advantage for the present situation, is
hardly better fitted for action : here we have no man of impulse, but a dreamer. Between these two
extremes lies the happy disposition of a memory docile enough to follow with precision all the outlines of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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