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living being. The danger may be mortal and the pain slight ; the pain may be unbearable (as in toothache)
and the: danger insignificant. There is then, there must be, a precise moment when pain intervenes : it is
when the interested
(57) part of the organism, instead of accepting the stimulation, repels it. And it is not merely a difference of
degree that separates perception from affection, but a difference in kind.
Now, we have considered the living body as a kind of centre whence is reflected on the surrounding objects
the action which these objects exercise upon it : in that reflexion external perception consists. But this
centre is not a mathematical point ; it is a body, exposed, like all natural bodies, to the action of external
causes which threaten to disintegrate it. We have just seen that it resists the influence of these causes. It
does not merely reflect action received from without ; it struggles, and thus absorbs some part of this
action. Here is the source of affection. We might therefore say, metaphorically, that while perception
measures the reflecting power of the body, affection measures its power to absorb.
But this is only a metaphor. We must consider the matter more carefully, in order to understand clearly that Affection differs from
perception in that it is
the necessity of affection follows from the very existence of perception. Perception, understood as we
real instead of virtual
understand it, measures our possible action upon things, and thereby, inversely, the possible action of
action
things upon us. The greater the body's power of action (symbolized by a higher degree of complexity in the
nervous system), the wider is the field that perception embraces. The distance which separates our body
from an object
(58) perceived really measures, therefore, the greater or less imminence of a danger, the nearer or more
remote fulfilment of a promise. And, consequently, our perception of an object distinct from our body,
separated from our body by an interval, never expresses anything but a virtual action. But the more the
distance decreases between this object and our body (the more, in other words, the danger becomes urgent
or the promise immediate), the more does virtual action tend to pass into real action. Suppose the distance
reduced to zero, that is to say that the object to be perceived coincides with our body, that is to say again,
that our body is the object to be perceived. Then it is no longer virtual action, but real action, that this
specialized perception will express: and this is exactly what affection is. Our sensations are, then, to our
perceptions that which the real action of our body is to its possible or virtual action. Its virtual action
concerns other objects, and is manifested within those objects ; its real action concerns itself, and is
manifested within its own substance. Everything then will happen as if, by a true return of real and virtual
actions to their points of application or of origin, the external images were reflected by our body into
surrounding space, and the real actions arrested by it within itself. And that is why its surface, the common
limit of the external and the internal, is the only portion of space which is both perceived and felt.
(59)
That is to say, once more, that my perception is outside my body, and my affection within it. Just as
external objects are perceived by me where they are, in themselves and not in me, so my affective states are
experienced there where they occur, that is, at a given point in my body. Consider the system of images
which is called the material world. My body is one of them. Around this image is grouped the
representation, i.e. its eventual influence on the others. Within it occurs affection, i.e. its actual effort upon
itself. Such is indeed the fundamental difference which every one of us naturally makes between an image
and a sensation. When we say that the image exists outside us, we signify by this that it is external to our
body. When we speak of sensation as an internal state, we mean that it arises within in our body. And this
is why we affirm that the totality of perceived images subsists, even if our body disappears, whereas we
know that we cannot annihilate our body without destroying our sensations.
That is to say pure
Hence we begin to see that we must correct, at least in this particular, our theory of pure perception. We
perception exists only
have argued as though our perception were a part of the images, detached, as such, from their entirety; as
in theory; in fact it is
though, expressing the virtual action of the object upon our body, or of our body upon the object,
always mixed with
perception merely isolated from the total object that aspect of it which
affection
(60)interests us. But we have to take into account the fact that our body is not a mathematical point in
space, that its virtual actions are complicated by and impregnated with real actions, or, in other words, that
there is no perception without affection. Affection is, then, that part or aspect of the inside of our body
which we mix with the image of external bodies; it is what we must first of all subtract from perception to
get the image in its purity. But the psychologist who shuts his eyes to the difference of function and nature
between perception and sensation,-the latter involving a real action, and the former a merely possible
action,-can only find between them a difference of degree. Because sensation (on account of the confused
effort which it involves) is only vaguely localized, he declares it unextended, and thence makes sensation
in general the simple element from which we obtain by composition all external images. The truth is that
affection is not the primary matter of which perception is made ; it is rather the impurity with which
perception is alloyed.
Here we grasp, at its origin, the error which leads the psychologist to consider sensation as unextended and
perception as an aggregate of sensations. This error is reinforced, as we shall see, by illusions derived from
a false conception of the rôle of space and of the nature of extensity. But it has also the support of
misinterpreted facts which we must now examine.
It appears, in the first place, as if the localiza
Why affection is
(61) -tion of an affective sensation in one part of the body were a matter of gradual training. A certain time
thought to be entirely
elapses before the child can touch with the finger the precise point where it has been pricked.-The fact is
unextended
indisputable ; but all that can be concluded from it is that some tentative essays are required to co-ordinate
the painful impressions on the skin, which has received the prick, with the impressions of the muscular
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