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VII. Let us point out to begin with the metaphysical, and no longer merely psychological, bearing of this
consciousness
last problem. No doubt we have a thesis of pure psychology in a proposition such as this: recollection is a
weakened perception., But let there be no mistake : if recollection is only a weakened perception, inversely
perception must be something like an intenser memory. Now the germ of English idealism is to be found
here. This idealism consists in finding only a difference of degree, and not of kind, between the reality of
the object perceived and the ideality of the object conceived. And the belief that we construct matter from
our interior states and that perception is only a true hallucination, also arises from this thesis. It is this belief
that we have always combated whenever we have treated of matter. Either, then, our conception of matter
is false, or memory is radically distinct from perception.
We have thus transposed a metaphysical problem so as to make it coincide with a psychological problem
which direct observation is able to solve. How does psychology solve it ? If the memory of a perception
were but this perception weakened, it might happen to us, for instance, to take the perception of a slight
sound for the recol-
(319) -lection of a loud noise. Now such a confusion never occurs. But we may go further, and say that the
consciousness of a recollection never occurs as an actual weak state which we try to relegate to the past so
soon as we become aware of its weakness. How, indeed, unless we already possessed the representation of
a past previously lived, could we relegate to it the less intense psychical states, when it would be so simple
to set them alongside of strong states as a present experience more confused beside a present experience
more distinct ? The truth is that memory does not consist in a regression from the present to the past, but,
on the contrary, in a progress from the past to the present. It is in the past that we place ourselves at a
stroke. We start from a virtual state' which we lead onwards, step by step, through a series of different
planes of consciousness, up to the goal where it is materialized in an actual perception ; that is to say, up to
the point where it becomes a present, active state; in fine, up to that extreme plane of our consciousness
against which our body stands out. In this virtual state pure memory consists.
How is it that the testimony of consciousness on this point is misunderstood ? How is it that we make of
recollection a weakened perception, of which it is impossible to say either why we relegate it to the past,
how we rediscover its date, or by what right it reappears at one moment rather than at another ? Simply
because we forget the
(320) practical end of all our actual psychical states. Perception is made into a disinterested work of the
mind, a pure contemplation. Then, as pure recollection can evidently be only something of this kind (since
it does not correspond to a present and urgent reality), memory and perception become states of the same
nature, and between them no other difference than a difference of intensity can be found. But the truth is
that our present should not be defined as that which is more intense : it is that which acts on us and which
makes us act, it is sensory and it is motor ;-our present is, above all, the state of our body. Our past, on the
contrary, is that which acts no longer but which might act, and will act by inserting itself into a present
sensation of which it borrows the vitality. It is true that, from the moment when the recollection actualizes
itself in this manner, it ceases to be a recollection and becomes once more a perception.
We understand then why a remembrance cannot be the result of a state of the brain. The state of the brain
continues the remembrance; it gives it a hold on the present by the materiality which it confers upon it : but
pure memory is a spiritual manifestation. With memory we are in very truth in the domain of spirit.
Associationism and
VIII. It was not our task to explore this domain. Placed at the confluence of mind and matter, desirous
general ideas
(321) chiefly of seeing the one flow into the other, we had only to retain, of the spontaneity of intellect, its
place of conjunction with bodily mechanism. In this way we were led to consider the phenomena of
association and the birth of the simplest general ideas.
What is the cardinal error of associationism ? It is to have set all recollections on the same plane, to have
misunderstood the greater or less distance which separates them from the present bodily state, that is from
action. Thus associationism is unable to explain either how the recollection clings to the perception which
evokes it, or why association is effected by similarity or contiguity rather than in any other way, or, finally,
by what caprice a particular recollection is chosen among the thousand others which similarity or
contiguity might equally well attach to the present perception. This means that associationism has mixed
and confounded all the different planes of consciousness, and that it persists in regarding a less complete as
a less complex recollection, whereas it is in reality a recollection less dreamed, more impersonal, nearer to
action and therefore more capable of moulding itself-like a ready-made garment-upon the new character of
the present situation. The opponents of associationism have, moreover, followed it on to this ground. They
combat the theory because it explains the higher operations of the mind by association, but not because it
misunderstands the true nature of
(322) association itself. Yet this is the original vice of associationism.
Between the plane of action-the plane in which our body has condensed its past into motor habits, -and the
plane of pure memory, where our mind retains in all its details the picture of our past life, we believe that
we can discover thousands of different planes of consciousness, a thousand integral and yet diverse
repetitions of the whole of the experience through which we have lived. To complete a recollection by
more personal details does not at all consist in mechanically juxtaposing other recollections to this, but in
transporting ourselves to a wider plane of consciousness, in going away from action in the direction of
dream. Neither does the localizing of a recollection consist in inserting it mechanically among other
memories, but in describing, by an increasing expansion of the memory as a whole, a circle large enough to
include this detail from the past. These planes, moreover, are not given as ready-made things superposed
the one on the other. Rather they exist virtually, with that existence which is proper to things of the spirit.
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