if we start from representation itself, that is to say from the totality of perceived images. My perception, in its pure state, isolated from memory, does not go on from my body to other bodies; it is, to begin with, in the aggregate of bodies, then gradually limits itself and adopts my body as a centre. And it is led to do so precisely by experience of the double faculty, which this body possesses, of performing actions and feeling affections; in a word, by experience of the sensori-motor power of a certain image, privileged among other images. For, on the one hand, this image always occupies the centre of representation, so that the other images range themselves round it in the very order in which they might be subject to its action; on the other hand, I know it from within, by sensations which I term affective, instead of knowing only, as in the case of the other images, its outer skin. There is then, in the aggregate of images, a privileged image, perceived in its depths and no longer only on the surface—the seat of affection and, at the same time, the source of action: it is this particular image which I adopt as the centre of my universe and as the physical basis of my personality.
But before we go on to establish the precise relation between the personality and the images in which it dwells, let us briefly sum up, contrasting it with the analyses of current psychology, the theory of pure perception which we have just sketched out.
We will return, for the sake of simplicity, to
