Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/160

146 It may be a general head which includes all retentiveness and reproduction, and may be enlarged to cover every habit, even where habit rightly or wrongly is applied to a case of mere physical mechanism. And hence nothing is easier than to defend memory as basal, if not as quite ultimate, and to refute the true view that it is a complex and late phenomenon. If, however, we keep in mind its various senses, less labour may be wasted.

Memory in its proper sense seems certainly complex, and involves a high degree and development of thinking, and memory for any sound psychology must be derivative and secondary. We may find it for the moment more convenient to postulate a faculty inexplicable and ultimate, by which I know my past events isolated or even in their synthesis with my present, an organ which gives us really the really existing past, or somehow immediately reports to us that which perhaps really does not exist—an oracle, which, although inexplicable or even perhaps because inexplicable, is to be accounted veracious. But the path which seems easy may be long in the end when it involves us in confusion, and a miracle, however cheap, in the end is dear when it entails the subversion of principle. And if against fact we are led to postulate the veracity of memory, that postulate, as I shall show, leads to ruinous scepticism.

Memory is an ideal construction of the past by which the present reality is qualified, or we know the past as an enlargement by ideal content of reality beyond the present. In this respect memory does not differ, it will be urged at once, from at least some inference and even from fancy. But without at present touching on these differences it will be better to ask in general how we are able at all to think of the past. There is, of course, the further question as to what in the end is the real nature of the past, but that question fortunately does not concern us here. We are to ask about the past simply so far as it is for us.

Now there are doctrines which I must take for granted without explanation or discussion, and all that I can here do is to try to state them so as to avoid unnecessary objections. If the reader finds that he dissents, I would ask him to consider this paper as written for others. We must first of all presuppose retentiveness and the growth of associations, the formation in other words of special dispositions to restore elements previously conjoined; and it is better to abstain here from the least attempt further to explain or formulate these doctrines, since that would involve us in controversy and in the discussion of some obstinate diffi-