Now, from his careful study of the pathological phenomena, manifested in
these cases, Bergson draws some very important conclusions in regard to
the nature of Memory and its relation to the brain. In 1896, when he
brought out his work Matiere et Memoire, in Paris, the general view was
against his conclusions and his opinions were ridiculed. By 1910, a
marked change had come about and he was able to refer to this in the new
introduction.[Footnote: See Bibliography, p. 158.] His view was no
longer considered paradoxical. The conception of aphasia, once
classical, universally admitted, believed to be unshakeable, had been
considerably shaken in that period of fourteen years. Localization, and
reference to centres would not, it was found, explain things
sufficiently.[Footnote: The work of Pierre Janet was largely influential
also in bringing about this change of view.] This involved a too rigid
and mechanical conception of the brain as a mere "box," and Bergson
attacks it very forcibly under the name of "the box theory." "All the
arguments," he says, "from fact which may be invoked in favour of a
probable accumulation of memories in the cortical substance, are drawn
from local disorders of memory. But if recollections were really
deposited in the brain, to definite gaps in memory characteristic
lesions of the brain would correspond. Now in those forms of amnesia in
which a whole period of our past existence, for example, is abruptly and
entirely obliterated from memory, we do not observe any precise cerebral
lesion; and on the contrary, in those disorders of memory where cerebral
localization is distinct and certain, that is to say, in the different
types of aphasia, and in the diseases of visual or auditory recognition,
we do not find that certain definite recollections are, as it were, torn
from their seat, but that it is the whole faculty of remembering that is
more or less diminished in vitality, as if the subject had more or less
difficulty in bringing his recollections into contact with the present
situation.
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