Daily Inspiration Quote by Henri Bergson

Bergson is trying to pry “the body” loose from the comforting idea that it’s a sealed, self-possessed thing. In one clean line, he reframes it as a relay station: what you call your body is not merely housed in a skull and steered by inner commands, but continually composed and recomposed by the traffic of the outside world. “External images” isn’t just visual scenery; in Bergson’s vocabulary it’s the full field of perceived objects. They don’t sit passively in the mind as pictures. They “transmit movement” into you. Perception, then, is already action at the level of the organism: the world presses, you answer.

The intent is polemical. Bergson is pushing back against both mechanistic materialism (the body as a machine moved only by physical causes) and a certain intellectualist psychology (the mind as a theater where representations are watched). His subtext is that the boundary between subject and object is porous, pragmatic, and negotiated. We perceive in order to do; consciousness selects from the flood of “images” what matters for possible movement. That’s why “the image that I call my body” lands with a sly humility: even your most intimate certainty is a label you apply to a functional image among other images.

Contextually, this sits in Matter and Memory, where Bergson tries to solve the mind-body problem without reducing either term. The line also reads like an early diagnosis of modern life: you are what touches you, what solicits you, what moves you. The self is less a sovereign narrator than a continuously updated interface with the world.