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Henri Bergson – Matter and Memory
The body, always turned towards action, has for its essential function to limit, with a view to action, the life of the spirit...  our perception, which exactly measures our virtual action on things, thus limits itself to the objects which actually influence our organs and prepare our movements................

[a person] would naturally believe that matter exists just as it is perceived; and since it is perceived as an image, the mind would make of it, in itself, an image….
We should astonish him quite as much by telling him that the object is entirely different from that which is perceived in it, that it has neither the colour ascribed to it by the eye, nor the resistance found in it by the hand.  The colours, the resistance, are, for him, in the object; they are not states of our mind; they are part and parcel of an existence really independent of our own.  For common sense then, the object exists in itself and on the other hand, the object is, in itself, pictorial, as we perceive it; image it is, but a self existing image...................

Psychology has accustomed us to assume the elementary sensations corresponding to the impressions received by the rods and cones of the retina.  With these sensations it goes on to reconstitute visual perception.  But in the first place, there is not one retina, but two; so that we have to explain how two sensations, held to be distinct, combine to form a single perception corresponding to what we call a point in space