In "Matter and Memory" (1896), his main work, the French philosopher and Nobel laureate Henri Bergson discusses the interplay between body and mind in free action. Written at the highest level of thought but in strikingly simple language, the work is one of the few outstanding foundational texts of contemporary philosophy, comparable in its time to Berkeley's "Principles" or Kant's "Critique." After Bergson attempted to establish a new basis for the relationship between freedom and determinism in "Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience," he turns here, engaging with the psychology and brain physiology of his time, to the old philosophical problem of the relationship between mind and matter. In doing so, he neither reduces matter idealistically to mere ideas nor does he take it materially as a thing.