"Whereas the cell occupies a determined point of the organism, an idea really fills our whole self. It is necessary that all our ideas become incorporated in this way into the mass of our states of consciousness. Many float on the surface, like dead leaves on the water of a pond. By this we mean that when our mind [esprit] thinks it always finds them again in a state of immobility, as if they were outside it. These are ideas we receive ready made and that inhabit us without ever becoming assimilated into our substance, or ideas that we have neglected to take up, and that have been dried out, abandoned. If, to the extent that we distance ourselves from the deeper layers of the self, our states of consciousness tend more and more to take the form of a numerical multiplicity and to deploy themselves in a homogenous space, it is precisely because, increasingly, these states of consciousness take on an inert mode of being, a more and more impersonal form ... But if, digging beneath the surface through which the self makes contact with external things, we penetrate into the depths of living and organized intelligence, we will observe the superimposition, or even the intimate fusion of many of these ideas which, once dissociated, seem to mutually exclude one another according to logical contradictions ... "

(Bergson, quoted in Thinking in Time, Suzanne Guerlac, p75)