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order to replace ourselves, first in the past in general, then in a certain region of the past-a work of
adjustment, something like the focussing of a camera. But our recollection still remains virtual; we simply
prepare ourselves to receive it by adopting the appropriate attitude. Little by little it comes into view like a
condensing cloud; from the virtual state it passes into the actual; and as its outlines become more distinct
and its surface takes on colour, it tends to imitate perception. But it remains attached to the past by its
deepest roots, and if, when once realized, it did not retain something of its original virtuality, if, being a
present state, it were not also something which stands out distinct from the present, we should never know
it for a memory.
The capital error of associationism is that it substitutes for this continuity of becoming, which is the living
reality, a discontinuous multiplicity of elements, inert and juxtaposed. Just because
Associationism
(172) each of the elements so constituted contains, by reason of its origin, something of what precedes and
substitutes solid
also of what follows, it must take to our eyes the form of a mixed and, so to speak, impure state. But the
elements laid side by
principle of associationism requires that each psychical state should be a kind of atom, a simple element.
side for the fluid
Hence the necessity for sacrificing, in each of the phases we have distinguished, the unstable to the stable,
moving reality, and
that is to say, the beginning to the end. If we are dealing with perception, we are asked to see in it nothing
makes of memory only
but the agglomerated sensations which colour it, and to overlook the remembered images which form its
a weakened perception
dim nucleus. If it is the remembered image that we are considering, we are bidden to take it already made,
realized in a weak perception, and to shut our eyes to the pure memory which this image has progressively
developed. In the rivalry which associationism thus sets up between the stable and the unstable, perception
is bound to expel the memory-image, and the memory-image to expel pure memory. And thus the pure
memory disappears altogether. Associationism, cutting in two by a line MO the totality of the progress AD,
sees, in the part OD, only the sensations which terminate it and which have been supposed to constitute the
whole of perception; --and, on the other hand it reduces also the part An to the realized image which pure
memory attains to as it expands. Psychical life, then, is en-
(173) -tirely summed up in these two elements, sensation and image. And as, on the one hand, this theory
drowns in the image the pure memory which makes the image into an original state, and, on the other hand,
brings the image yet closer to perception by putting into perception, in advance, something of the image
itself, it ends by finding between these two states only a difference of degree, or of intensity. Hence the
distinction between strong states and weak states, of which the first are supposed to be set up by us as
perceptions of the present, and the second (why, no man knows) as representations of the past. But the truth
is that we shall never reach the past unless we frankly place ourselves within it. Essentially virtual, it
cannot be known as something past unless we follow and adopt the movement by which it expands into a
present image, thus emerging from obscurity into the light of day. In vain do we seek its trace in anything
actual and already realized: we might as well look for darkness beneath the light. This is, in fact, the error
of associationism : placed in the actual, it exhausts itself in vain attempts to discover in a realized and
present state the mark of its past origin, to distinguish memory from perception, and to erect into a
difference in kind that which it condemned in advance to be but a difference of magnitude.
To picture is not to remember. No doubt a recollection, as it becomes actual, tends to live in
(174) an image ; but the converse is not true, and the image, pure and simple, will not be referred to the
past unless, indeed, it was in the past that I sought it, thus following the continuous progress which brought
it from darkness into light. This is what psychologists too often forget when they conclude, from the fact
that a remembered sensation becomes more actual the more we dwell upon it, that the memory of the
sensation is the sensation itself beginning to be. The fact which they allege is undoubtedly true : the more I
strive to recall a past pain, the nearer I come to feeling it in reality. But this is easy to understand, since the
progress of a memory precisely consists, as we have said, in its becoming materialized. The question is was
the memory of a pain, when it began, really pain? Because the hypnotized subject ends by feeling hot when
he is repeatedly told that he is hot, it does not follow that the words of the suggestion were themselves hot.
Neither must we conclude that, because the memory of a sensation prolongs itself into that very sensation,
the memory was a nascent sensation: perhaps indeed this memory plays, with regard to the sensation which
follows it, precisely the part of the hypnotizer who makes the suggestion. The argument we are criticizing,
presented in this form, is then already of no value as proof ; but still, it is not yet a vicious argument,
because it profits by the incontestable truth that memory passes into something else by becoming actual.
The absurdity becomes patent
(175) when the argument is inverted (although this ought to be legitimate on the hypothesis adopted), that
is to say, when the intensity of the sensation is decreased instead of the intensity of pure memory being
increased. For then, if the two states differ merely in degree, there should be a given moment at which the
sensation changed into a memory. If the memory of an acute pain, for instance, is but a slight pain,
inversely an intense pain which I feel will end, as it grows less, by being an acute pain remembered. Now
the moment will come, undoubtedly, when it is impossible for me to say whether what I feel is a slight
sensation which I experience or a slight sensation which I imagine (and this is natural, because the memory-
image is already partly sensation); but never will this weak state appear to me to be the memory of a strong
state. Memory, then, is something quite different.
But the illusion which consists in establishing only a difference of degree between memory and perception
is more than a mere consequence of associationism, more than an accident in the history of philosophy. Its
roots lie deep. It rests, in the last analysis, on a false idea of the nature and of the object of external
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