________________
THE HOLY TRINITY.
601
nations is not wiped out with the death of the physical body, but constitutes the nucleus which passes from life to life, as will be shown more fully later.
Bergson has clearly shown that the human body is a sensory-motor organism ; by its activity it keeps the attention confined to the present, and thus inhibits reflection. But whenever action is undetermined, opportunity is afforded to the faculty of reflection of going over past experience in search of the principle of guidance in the present emergency. We then reflect, (re, back, and flexio, to bend, or turn), that is, we turn our will back on its own past experience, thus making it vibrate at different rhythms, till the required memory is secured.
The past, then, is preserved* in the mind not in the * Cf. “Memory, as we have tried to prove, is not a faculty of putting away recollections in a drawer, or of inscribing them in a register. There is no register, no drawer; there is not even, properly speaking, a faculty, for a faculty works intermittently, when it will or when it can, whilst the piling up of the past upon the past, goes on without relaxation. In reality, the past is preserved by itself, automatically. In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought or willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside. The cerebral mechanism is arranged just so as to drive back into the unconscious almost the whole of this past, and to admit beyond the threshold only that which can cast light on the present situation or further the action now being prepared-in short, only that which can give useful work. At the most, a few superinous recollections may succeed in smuggling themselves through the half-open door. These memories, messengers from the unconscious. remind us of what we are dragging behind us anawares. But, even though we may have no distinct idea of it, we feel vaguely that our past romains present to us. What are we, in fact, what is our character, if not the condensation of the history that we have
40
Jain Education International
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org