Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/162

148 which is ideal and yet real, which is often not practical except remotely and indirectly, and which can conflict sharply with our presented perception and our presented need. The passage to this new world is the barrier, if there is one, between the animal and the human mind. The animal mind (I am here compelled to be dogmatic) has neither past nor future. It has no world but the reality felt present and given, a present qualified ideally and qualified incompatibly with itself, but never transcended and itself degraded to be but another qualification. It has ideas assuredly and from the first, and, if it had not ideas, it could most assuredly have no conation or desire. But the ideas of the animal mind are but adjectives of the given, ideas that enlarge the given and may indefinitely distract it, but never set themselves up beside it as other and equal realities. Hence the animal could never say, Yesterday I was sad but I shall be happy to-morrow. Its present is clouded and is brightened by the movement of its ideas, but remains always its present; its revenges are never retribution for the past, and even its plans, where it has plans, are no forecast of the future. It has, in brief, no world sundered from the world of its immediate practical interest, and to take an immediate practical interest in the past as past is surely not possible.

I regret to be unable to explain and defend this brief statement. It may serve, perhaps, to point out the interval which in my judgment separates memory from the lower level of mind. How in detail that interval is filled up and crossed I cannot here discuss. I agree that it is the use of language for social needs which is the principal agent. It is in this manner, I agree, that in fact we gain a world of ideas beyond, and in part incompatible with, our personal world, an ideal order which seems fixed and independent and which subordinates the present. On the other hand, I must demur to the conclusion that without society no such ideal world is in principle possible or could slowly be fixed by the mind. But, however it may have arisen, it is this ideal order which makes memory possible, and apart from this development to postulate memory is to invoke a senseless miracle.

I will pass next to the difficulty which arises from the direction of our thoughts. The past lies behind us while, it seems, we can only think forwards. Given the disposition to an ideal series b-c-d, then, if Xb is presented, the identity of b can develop X ideally as Xb-c-d. But if, on the other hand, Xd is presented, how are we able to arrive at b-c? Our sensations, we may say, come wave on wave out of the future and disappear backwards into the past, while the