It is the direction of this work that we are concerned to determine.
According to the popular idea, perception has a completely speculative interest: it is pure knowledge. Therein lies the fundamental mistake.
Notice first of all how much more probable it is, a priori, that the work of perception, just as any other natural and spontaneous work, should have a utilitarian signification.
"Life," says Mr Bergson with justice, "is the acceptance from objects of nothing but the useful impression, with the response of the appropriate reactions." ("Laughter", page 154.)
And this view receives striking objective confirmation if, with the author of "Matter and Memory", we follow the progress of the perceptive functions along the animal series from the protoplasm to the higher vertebrates; or if, with him, we analyse the task of the body, and discover that the nervous system is manifested in its very structure as, before all, an instrument of action. Have we not already besides proof of this in the fact that each of us always appears in his own eyes to occupy the centre of the world he perceives?
The "Riquet" of Anatole France voices Mr Bergson's view: "I am always in the centre of everything, and men and beasts and things, for or against me, range themselves around."
But direct analysis leads us still more plainly to the same conclusion.
Let us take the perception of bodies. It is easy to show—and I regret that I cannot here reproduce Mr Bergson's masterly demonstration—that the division of matter into distinct objects with sharp outlines is produced by a selection of images which is completely relative to our practical needs.
"The distinct outlines which we assign to an object, and which bestow upon it its individuality, are nothing but the graph of a certain kind of influence which we should be able to employ at a certain point in space: it is the plan of our future actions which is submitted to our eyes, as in a mirror, when we perceive the surfaces and edges of things. Remove this action, and in consequence the high roads which it makes for itself in advance by perception, in the web of reality, and the individuality of the body will be reabsorbed in the universal interaction which is without doubt reality itself." Which is tantamount to saying that "rough bodies are cut in the material of nature by a perception of which the scissors follow, in some sort, the dotted line along which the action would pass." ("Creative Evolution", page 12.)
Bodies independent of common experience do not then appear, to an attentive criticism, as veritable realities which would have an existence in themselves. They are only centres of co-ordination for our actions. Or, if you prefer it, "our needs are so many shafts of light which, when played upon the continuity of perceptible qualities, produce in them the outline of distinct bodies." ("Matter and Memory", page 220.) Does not science too, after its own fashion, resolve the atom into a centre of intersecting relations, which finally extend by degrees to the entire universe in an indissoluble interpenetration?