Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/84

 70 HENRY RUTGERS MARSHALL: recognise that what are called " representations " are in no sense copies of what has gone before. In every-day English speech we use the verb " to represent " with the meaning " to stand for " rather than with the meaning " to present again ". This is as if the common man had quite naively come to agree that when we speak of presenting again we are really speaking inaccurately of a presentation which merely stands for a presentation that has preceded the one under con- sideration ; and that the notion that we ever do have actual re-presentations is an illusion. And at times recognition of this fact seems to be very explicit indeed. No one will claim, for instance, that the secondary presentation (the so-called re-presentation) of the face of his friend who died five years ago is in any way exactly the same thing as the secondary presentation to which he attached the same name the day after his friend's death. We all agree that when considerable lapses of time are taken into account, these secondary presentations are so much changed as to be practically new at all events, and we must likewise acknowledge that the change which is thus recognised must have been a gradual one. It is a marked one now that five years have passed away ; it was just noticeable one year after the loss ; it was unnoticeable a month after the death. At first sight it is likely to seem necessary to some reader to hold that we are here dealing with a continuing presenta- tion which has been losing attributes and connexions as time has flown ; for how else, it may be asked, can we know at all that the secondary presentation of a year ago has altered : if it appears to us to be the same in any respect it would seem that in some way we must hold a permanent somewhat ; otherwise comparison of the secondary presentation, or re- vival, of one time could not be made with the secondary presentation of another time ; indeed he may claim that in some manner the very original presentation remains with us to be compared with the miserable counterpart which we call the revival as it is to-day. Dr. James Ward, for instance, in an article published in the issue of MIND of October, 1883 (p. 478), holds that revivability involves identification in which one thinks, this mental state (m 2 ) is identical with the state (ra) which has been before presented to me, and says : " There seems but one way out of our difficulty, and that is to assume that after all the m was continuously presented but with a diminished and perhaps ever-diminishing intensity ; and further, that at its so-called representation its intensity was sufficiently