of our intelligence and our sensibility. But does it follow that every degree, every shade, every detail of sensation, even the most insignificant, has any importance for the action? The variations of sensibility are much more numerous than those of movements and of adaptation; very probably, as is seen in an attentive study of infancy, sensibility precedes the power of motion in its differentiations. A child shows an extraordinary acuteness of perception at an age when its hand is still very clumsy. The correlation, then, is not absolute. And then even if it were so, it would not follow that the suppression of any movement would produce by rebound the suppression of the sensation to which this movement habitually corresponds. On this hypothesis, a sensation which loses its motor effect becomes useless. Be it so; but this does not prove that the uselessness of a sensation is synonymous with insensibility. I can very well imagine the movement being suppressed and the useless sensation continuing to evoke images and to be perceived. Does not this occur daily? There are patients who, after an attack of paralysis remain paralysed in one limb, which loses the voluntary movement, but does not necessarily lose its sensibility. Many clear cases are observed in which this dissociation takes place. I therefore own that I cannot follow M. Bergson in his deduction. As a physiologist, I am obliged to believe firmly in the existence of the sensory nerves, and therefore I continue to suppose that our conscious sensations are consequent to the excitement of these nerves and subordinate to their integrity. Now, as therein lies, unless I mistake, the essential postulate, the heart of M. Bergson's theory, by not admitting it I must regretfully reject the whole. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 47: I borrow this quotation from RENOUVIER, _Le Personnellisme_, p. 263.] [Footnote 48: _Matiere et Memoire_, p. 3. The author has returned to this point more at length in a communication to the Congres de Philosophie de Geneve, in 1904. See _Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale_, Nov. 1904, communication from H. BERGSON entitled "Le Paralogisme psycho-physiologique." Here is a passage from this article which expresses the same idea: "To say that the image of the surrounding world issues from this image (from the cerebral movement), or that it expresses itself by this image, or that it arises as soon as this image is suggested, or that one gives it to one's self by giving one's self this image, would be to contradict one's self; since these two images, the outer world and the intra-cerebral movement, have been supposed to be of the same nature, and the second image is, by the hypothesis, an infinitesimal part of the field of representation, while the first fills the whole of it."] [Footnote 49: _Matiere et Memoire_, p. 31] CHAPTER V CONCLUSION