Matter, Memory, and the Paradox of Perception: Henri Bergson on How to See Reality

In 1896, decades before Santiago Ramón y Cajal pioneered neuroscience, more than a century before Oliver Sacks showed us how perception phosphoresces in the 100 milliseconds between the world and us, half a lifetime before he was awarded the Nobel Prize, the polymathic French philosopher Henri Bergson (October 18, 1859–January 4, 1941) aimed his uncommon mind at “the threefold problem of matter, consciousness, and their relation” in what became Matter and Memory (public library | public domain) — a pleasingly disorienting, because revelatory, investigation of the interplay between perception and memory in how we construct the cathedral of interpretation we… read article