Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/63

Rh be found in such passages as follow : "The similarity of two things does not exist till both things are there it is meaningless to talk of it as an agent of production of anything, whether in the physical or the psychical realms. It is a relation which the mind perceives after the fact," etc. (p. 591). And returning to the peculiar form of knowledge called memory, we quote these words: "The clock strikes to-day; it struck yesterday; and may strike a million times ere it wears out. . . . But does the present clock-stroke become aware of the past ones, . . . because it repeats and resembles them? Assuredly not. And let it not be said that this is because clock-strokes . . . are physical and not psychical objects; for psychical objects (sensations for example) simply recurring in successive editions will remember each other on that account no more than clock-strokes do. No memory is involved in the mere fact of recurrence. . . . A farther condition is required before the present image can be held to stand for a past original" (p. 650 f.).

It would be difficult to find in any work on psychology a more clear and emphatic avowal, that "blank unmediated correspondences" between recurrent brain-processes and recurrent thoughts and feelings furnish no adequate explanation of the admitted facts and elements of every act of self-conscious re-cognitive memory. Moreover, there are few writers on psychology that really introduce a more elaborate "machine-shop" of psychic syntheses, dynamic reactions of consciousness, welcoming and rejecting, selecting processes of a spiritual principle called "mind," than does Professor James. Surely, then, some of his own words when quoted must seem to their author "characteristic of the reigning half-way modes of thought." They certainly fail to "pool our mysteries," by the doubtful process of accounting for what is not conscious (and, therefore, according to Professor James, not mental) at all, and then just simply adding consciousness, "in the lump" as it were, so as to render the account adequate for the life of the mind.

I have already said that Professor James' treatment of Perception, or the form of knowledge which we call knowledge of Things, seems to me by far the best portion of his volumes. It