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(80) know of it is an empty show, might as well engender thought as any other phenomenon.
The truth is that there is one, and only one, method of refuting materialism : it is to show that matter is
precisely that which it appears to be. Thereby we eliminate all virtuality, all hidden power, from matter,
and establish the phenomena of spirit as an independent reality. But to do this we must leave to matter
those qualities which materialists and spiritualists alike strip from it: the latter that they may make of them
representations of the spirit, the former that they may regard them only as the accidental garb of space.
This, indeed, is the attitude of common sense with regard to matter, and for this reason common sense
believes in spirit. It seems to us that philosophy should here adopt the attitude of common sense, although
correcting it in one respect. Memory, inseparable in practice from perception, imports the past into the
present, contracts into a single intuition many moments of duration, and thus by a twofold operation
compells us, de facto, to perceive matter in ourselves, whereas we, de jure, perceive matter within matter.
Hence the cardinal
Hence the capital importance of the problem of memory. If it is memory above all that lends to perception
importance of the
its subjective character, the philosophy of matter must aim in the first instance, we said, at eliminating the
problem of memory
contributions of memory. We
(81) must now add that, as pure perception gives us the whole or at least the essential part of matter (since
the rest comes from memory and is superadded to matter), it follows that memory must be, in principle, a
power absolutely independent of matter. If, then, spirit is a reality, it is here, in the phenomenon of
memory, that we may come into touch with it experimentally. And hence any attempt to derive pure
memory from an operation of the brain should reveal on analysis a radical illusion.
Seeing that a true
Let us put the same statement in clearer language. We maintain that matter has no occult or unknowable
power, and that it coincides, in essentials, with pure perception. Thence we conclude that the living body in theory of memory
refutes materialism
general, and the nervous system in particular, are only channels for the transmission of movements, which,
received in the form of stimulation, are transmitted in the form of action, reflex or voluntary. That is to say,
it is vain to attribute to the cerebral substance the property of engendering representations. Now the
phenomena of memory, in which we believe that we can grasp spirit in its most tangible form, are precisely
those of which a superficial psychology is most ready to find the origin in cerebral activity alone ; just
because they are at the point of contact between consciousness and matter, and because even the
adversaries of materialism have no objection to treating the brain as a storehouse
(82) of memories. But if it could be positively established that the cerebral process answers only to a very
small part of memory, that it is rather the effect than the cause, that matter is here as elsewhere the vehicle
of an action and not the substratum of a knowledge, then the thesis which we are maintaining would be
demonstrated by the very example which is commonly supposed to be most unfavourable to it, and the
necessity might arise of erecting spirit into an independent reality. In this way also, perhaps, some light
would be thrown on the nature of what is called spirit, and on the possibility of the interaction of spirit and
matter. For a demonstration of this kind could not be purely negative. Having shown what memory is not,
we should have to try to discover what it is. Having attributed to the body the sole function of preparing
actions, we are bound to enquire why memory appears to be one with this body, how bodily lesions
influence it, and in what sense it may be said to mould itself upon the state of the brain matter. It is,
moreover, impossible that this enquiry should fail to give us some information as to the psychological
mechanism of memory, and the various mental operations connected therewith. And, inversely, if the
problems of pure psychology seem to acquire some light from our hypothesis, this hypothesis itself will
thereby gain in certainty and weight.
But we must present this same idea in yet a
And might lead to an
(83) third form, so as to make it quite clear why the problem of memory is in our eyes a privileged
problem. From our analysis of pure perception issue two conclusions which are in some sort divergent, one empirical solution of
metaphysical problems
of them going beyond psychology in the direction of psycho-physiology, and the other in that of
metaphysics, but neither allowing of immediate verification. The first concerns the office of the brain in
perception: we maintain that the brain is an instrument of action, and not of representation. We cannot
demand from facts the direct confirmation of this thesis, because pure perception bears, by definition, upon
present objects, acting on our organs and our nerve centres ; and because everything always happens, in
consequence, as though our perceptions emanated from our cerebral state, and were subsequently projected
upon an object which differs absolutely from them. In other words, with regard to external perception the
thesis which we dispute and that which we substitute for it lead to precisely the same consequences, so that
it is possible to invoke in favour of either the one or the other its greater intelligibility, but not the authority
of experience. On the contrary, the empirical study of memory may and must decide between them. For
pure recollection is, by hypothesis, the representation of an absent object. If the necessary and sufficient
cause of perception lies in a certain activity of the brain, this same cerebral activity,
(84) repeating itself more or less completely in the absence of the object, will suffice to reproduce
perception: memory will be entirely explicable by the brain. But if we find that the cerebral mechanism
does indeed in some sort condition memories, but is in no way sufficient to ensure their survival; if it
concerns, in remembered perception, our action rather than our representation ; we shall be able to infer
that it plays an analogous part in perception itself, and that its office is merely to ensure our effective action
on the object present. Our first conclusion may thus find its verification.-There would still remain this
second conclusion, which is of a more metaphysical order,-biz. : that in pure perception we are actually
placed outside ourselves, we touch the reality of the object in an immediate intuition. Here also an
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