of a given situation all the memories which have reference to it.  To live only in the present, to respond to a stimulus by the immediate reaction which prolongs it, is the mark of the lower animals; the man who proceeds in this way is a man of impulse.  But he who lives in the past, for the mere pleasure of living there, and in whom recollections emerge into the light of consciousness, without any advantage for the present situation, is hardly better fitted for action; here we have no man of impulse, but a dreamer.  Between these two extremes lies the happy disposition of a memory docile enough to follow with precision all the outlines of the present situation, but energetic enough to resist all other appeal.  Good sense or practical sense, is probably nothing but this."[Footnote:  Matter and Memory, p. 198 (Fr. pp. 166-167).]

In the paper L’Effort intellectuel, contributed in 1902 to the Revue philosophique, and now reprinted in L’Energie spirituelle,[Footnote:  Pp. 163-202.  See also Mind-Energy.]Bergson gives an analysis of what is involved in intellectual effort.  There is at first, he shows, something conceived quite generally, an idea vague and abstract, a schema which has to be completed by distinct images.  In thought there is a movement of the mind from the plane of the schema to the plane of the concrete image.  Various images endeavour to fit themselves into the schema, or the schema may adapt itself to the reception of the images.  These double efforts to secure adaptation and cooperation may both encounter resistance from the other, a situation which is known to us as hesitation, accompanied by the awareness of obstacles, thus involving intellectual effort.

Memory then, Bergson wishes us to realize, in response to his treatment of it, is no mere function of the brain; it is something infinitely more subtle, infinitely more elusive, and more wondrous.  Our memories are not stored in the brain like letters in a filing cabinet, and all our past survives indestructibly as Memory, even though in the form of unconscious memory.  We must recognize Memory to be a spiritual fact and so regard it as a pivot on which turn many discussions of vital importance when we come to investigate the problem of the relation of soul and body.  For “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."[Footnote:  Matter and Memory, p. 81 (Fr. p. 68).] “Memory,” he would remind us finally, “is just the intersection of mind and matter."[Footnote:  Matter and Memory, Introduction, p. xii.] “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."[Footnote:  Matter and Memory, p. 320 (Fr. p. 268).]