Observations placeholder
Bergson, Henri - Matter and Memory - Atoms and functions
Identifier
015006
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
If we are made up of atoms which are in reality ‘objects’ containing function. And each aggregate expresses only the functions that apply to that named thing, then both perception and activity in general is actually a process not of receiving signals but rejecting signals that are not relevant to that aggregate.
A description of the experience
Henri Bergson – Matter and Memory
Now if living beings are, within the universe, just ‘centres of indetermination’, and if the degree of this indetermination is measured by the number and rank of their functions, we can conceive that their mere presence is equivalent to the suppression of all those parts of objects in which their functions find no interest. They allow to pass through them, so to speak, those external influences which are indifferent to them; the others isolated become ‘perceptions’ by their very isolation