less diminished in vitality, as if the subject had more or less difficulty in bringing his recollections into contact with the present situation."[Footnote:  Matter and Memory, p. 315 (Fr. pp. 264-265).] But as it is a fact that the past survives under two distinct forms, viz., “motor mechanisms” and “independent recollections,” we find that this explains why “in all cases where a lesion of the brain attacks a certain category of recollections, the affected recollections do not resemble each other by all belonging to the same period, or by any logical relationship to one another, but simply in that they are all auditive or all visual or all motor.  That which is damaged appears to be the various sensorial or motor areas, or more often still, those appendages which permit of their being set going from within the cortex rather than the recollections themselves."[Footnote:  Matter and Memory, p. 317 (Fr. p. 266).] Going even further than this, by the study of the recognition of words, and of sensory-aphasia, Bergson shows that “recognition is in no way affected by a mechanical awakening of memories that are asleep in the brain.  It implies, on the contrary, a more or less high degree of tension in consciousness, which goes to fetch pure recollections in pure memory, in order to materialize them progressively, by contact with the present perception."[Footnote:  Matter and Memory, p. 317 (Fr. p. 266).]

In the face of all this mass of evidence and thoroughness of argument which Bergson brings forward, we are led to conclude that Memory is indeed something other than a function of the brain.  Criticizing Wundt’s view,[Footnote:  As expressed in his Grundzuge der physiologische psychologie, vol.  I., pp. 320-327.  See Matter and Memory, p. 164 (Fr. p. 137).]Bergson contends that no trace of an image can remain in the substance of the brain and no centre of apperception can exist.  “There is not in the brain a region in which memories congeal and accumulate.  The alleged destruction of memories by an injury to the brain is but a break in the continuous progress by which they actualize themselves."[Footnote:  Matter and Memory, p. 160 (Fr. p. 134).] It is then futile to ask in what spot past memories are stored.  To look for them in any place would be as meaningless as asking to see traces of the telephonic message upon the telephone wire.

“Memory,” it has been said, “is a faculty which loses nothing and records everything."[Footnote:  Ball, quoted by Rouillard, Les Amnesies, Paris, 1885, p. 25; Matter and Memory, p. 201 (Fr. p. 168).] This is only too true, although normally we do not recognize it.  But we can never be sure that we have absolutely forgotten anything.  Illness, producing delirium, may provoke us to speak of things we had thought were gone beyond recall and which perhaps we even wish were beyond recall.  A somnambulistic state or even a dream may show us memory extending far further back than we could ordinarily imagine.  The facing