Noel’s Reviews > Matter and Memory > Status Update

…past is “a reality which endures and is prolonged into its present” (duration again); and (3) there’s no real distinction between our immediate past (that is, our present) and our memories, except in degree—consciousness merely illuminates what’s useful in determining an undetermined future: our immediate past (our present), and maybe our more remote past states that can be usefully combined with it, “the rest remain[ing] in the dark” (Bergson explains in the first chapter that perception is utilitarian). Therefore, thought is a “movement” conditioned by the infinite multitude of the details of our past history. “This survival of the past per se forces itself upon philosophers, then, under one form or another; the difficulty that we have in conceiving it comes simply from the fact that we extend to the series of memories, in time, that obligation of containing and being contained which applies only to the collection of bodies instantaneously perceived in space. The fundamental illusion consists in transferring to duration itself, in its continuous flow, the form of the instantaneous sections which we make in it” (p. 149).

Above the body, with its mechanisms which symbolize the accumulated effort of past actions, the memory which imagines and repeats has often 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 which had been separated to begin with cohere closely together. Seen from this point of view, indeed, our body is nothing but that part of our representation which is ever 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… (p. 152)

(Eek, I got terribly mixed up defining duration so I had to repost this. Really, I shouldn’t be trusted…)