Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/59

Rh more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks."

Now, in what respect a Thought which " welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks," and always tends to understand itself as a part of a personal consciousness, and deals with objects independent of itself, involves fewer necessities of metaphysical postulating than does the mind, or soul, which is with Helmholtz and Wundt an actual energy of psychic synthesizing, I am quite unable to see. But I am yet more unable to see any satisfactory account in these volumes of the precise brain-processes with which many of these profound functions of such a "Thought" correspond. Perhaps the nearest approach to such an account is to be found in the treatment of Memory; and to this treatment we now briefly turn our attention.

Of all the so-called faculties of mind, or factors and functions of psychic life, memory seems most readily to admit of a purely cerebral explanation. Without memory, of course, the consciousness of self and the cognition of things are impossible. It does not follow, however, that, if psychology as a natural science in the sense which Professor James attaches to the words could solve the problem of memory, it could, therefore, solve also the problems of self-consciousness and sense-perception. With characteristic honesty and thoroughness and acuteness of analysis, Professor James describes what is involved in an act of memory, in the highest, most spiritual — if I may be pardoned the word use of this faculty. It is emphatically said (I, p. 649 f.) that "the revival of an image" is not, as many writers (e.g. Spencer, etc.) suppose, all that is needed to constitute the memory of an actual occurrence. "No memory is involved in the mere fact of recurrence." Besides this mere fact of recurrence, the condition of memory is that "the fact imaged be expressly referred to the past, thought as in the past." "But even this would not be memory. Memory requires more than mere dating of a fact in the past. It must be dated in my past."

In other words, Professor James' descriptive science admits that memory, in the highest form of its exercise, involves something more than mere retention and reproduction. It involves