Daily Inspiration Quote by Henri Bergson

Bergson is picking a fight with the reflexive modern habit of treating the mind like mission control: stimulus comes in, the brain “processes,” action comes out, and perception is just an internal copy. He flips the wiring. If the brain state is the beginning of an action, not the condition of a perception, then the brain isn’t a projector generating the world; it’s a switchboard that selects, delays, and routes movement. Perception, on this view, is less a private picture than a practical placement of the body in the world.

The subtext is an attack on representationalism and the budding neuroscientific temptation (already strong in early psychology) to explain experience by stuffing it inside the skull. Bergson’s sly move is to make perception “within the things themselves” without lapsing into naive realism. He’s not denying consciousness; he’s relocating its work. Perception becomes an economy: what matters is what can be acted on. The “image of our body” is the hinge. The body is an image among images, but a privileged one because it is the point where the world can be altered.

Context matters: Bergson is writing against both mechanistic materialism and static intellectual abstraction, insisting on duration, flux, and lived time. In Matter and Memory, the stakes are ethical and existential as much as epistemic: if perception is action-oriented, then attention, habit, and freedom are not afterthoughts. They are the very grammar of how reality shows up for us.