this indeterminateness and this choice. "But there is in this necessary
poverty of conscious perception, something that is positive, that
foretells spirit; it is, in the etymological sense of the word,
discernment.'"[Footnote: Matter and Memory, p. 31 (Fr. p. 26).] The
chief difficulty in dealing with the problems of Perception, is to
explain "not how Perception arises, but how it is limited, since it
should be the image of the whole and is in fact reduced to the image of
that which interests you."[Footnote: Matter and Memory, p. 34 (Fr. p.
29).] We only make an insuperable difficulty if we imagine Perception to
be a kind of photographic view of things, taken from a fixed point by
that special apparatus which is called an organ of perception--a
photograph which would then be developed in the brain-matter by some
unknown chemical and psychical process. "Everything happens as though
your perception were a result of the internal motions of the brain and
issued in some sort from the cortical centres. It could not actually
come from them since the brain is an image like others, enveloped in the
mass of other images, and it would be absurd that the container should
issue from the content. But since the structure of the brain is like the
detailed plan of the movements among which you have the choice, and
since that part of the external images which appears to return upon
itself, in order to constitute perception, includes precisely all the
points of the universe which these movements could affect, conscious
perception and cerebral movement are in strict correspondence. The
reciprocal dependence of these two terms is therefore simply due to the
fact that both are functions of a third, which is the indetermination of
the Will."[Footnote: Matter and Memory, p. 35 (Fr. p. 29).]

Moreover, we must recognize that the image is formed and perceived in
the object, not in the brain, even although it would seem that rays of
light coming from a point P are perceived along the path of the sensori-