OF THE SELECTION OF IMAGES FOR CONSCIOUS PRESENTATION. WHAT OUR BODY MEANS AND DOES.

We will assume for the moment that we know nothing of theories of matter and theors of spirit, nothing of the discussions as to the reality or ideality of the external world. Here I am in the presence of images, in the vaguest sense of the word, images perceived when my senses are opened to them, unperceived when they are closed. All these images act and react upon one another in all their elementary parts according to constant laws which I call laws of nature, and, as a perfect knowledge of these laws would probably allow us to calculate and to foresee what will happen in each of these images, the future of the images must be contained in their present and will add to them nothing new.

Yet there is one of them which is distinct from all the others, in that I do not know it only from without by perceptions, but from within by affections: it is my body...

-- Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, Chapter 1, Paragraph 1, 1896
(Amazon).