CHAPTER III. MEMORY. The trustworthiness of our faculty of memory is a second fact which is involved in the primary fact of our self-knowledge. That our faculty of memory is veracious, is a truth which is self-evident, incapable of proof, and cannot be denied without producing absolute scepticism. Second fundamental fact, the trustworthiness of memory—What the damental trustworthi ness of memory. THE two preceding chapters have brought us thus far: "There is such a thing as certainty, and amongst those things which are supremely certain is the fact of our own existence." In our pursuit of truth, we may next consider Second funa second fact, the certainty of which is involved in that fact, the of our own persistent and continuous being. This second fact is the trustworthiness of our faculty of memory. But many objections to the unqualified assertion of its trustworthiness will readily occur to the reader's mind. It is obvious that not only may we sometimes fail to recollect events in which we have borne a part, but that we may even fancy some circumstances to have been the very reverse of what in fact they were. We occasionally meet with people in a state of doubt as to whether they had or had not some particular past experience, and with others who feel confident they were witnesses of something which they were never near witnessing-as George the Fourth is said to have made himself believe that he was present at the battle of Waterloo, or as women have died for their conviction that they had actually ridden through the air on broomsticks. It is plain that individuals may make mistakes as to what they remember, and defects of memory which occasionally occur are very singular and surprising. Thus some persons may lose the recollection of particular parts of speech-as of all adjectives or all pronouns—and others, who have sustained some injury of the head, may find great gaps in their memory of the past, which gaps will gradually close up as they recover from the effects of the damage inflicted on them. But such exceptional phenomena do not tell against the fact of the general trustworthiness of memory. In the last chapter it was shown that the existence of idiots and of half demented persons unable to recognize their own personal identity, did not tell against the certainty of our self-knowledge generally. It was also declared that this work is addressed to persons of ordinary capacity, and is not intended as a means for remedying any exceptional intellectual deficiency; and this, of course, also applies to any abnormal deficiency in, or perversion of, the power of memory. But an objection which seems at first to have much force in it may be made to memory's truthfulness. It may be said that our recollection as to anything whatever is less trustworthy than is our knowledge of what we are actually experiencing at the moment. Now, it is of course true that our knowledge of many past events is not so absolutely certain as is our knowledge of some present events; but what we are concerned with here is not the trustworthiness of particular facts of memory, but the veracity of our faculty of memory. It is to be freely conceded that individuals may make occasional mistakes as to this or that past event, but the trustworthiness of our faculty of memory, as a faculty, remains absolutely certain notwithstanding. It informs us as to some portions of the past as certainly as our consciousness informs us concerning some portions of the present. Such is the case, since we cannot have, even as to the present, that supreme certainty which accompanies our reflex con sideration about anything we may be actually experiencing —as when we say "Now I certainly am hot"—unless our faculty of memory is supremely certain also-as will shortly appear. word denotes. Let us first, however, see what the term "memory" What the really denotes. Evidently we cannot be said to remem- " memory" ber anything unless we are conscious that the thing we so remember has been present to our mind on some previous occasion. An image might recur to our imagination a hundred times; but if at each recurrence it seemed to us something altogether new and unconnected with the past, we could not be said to remember it. It would, in fact, be rather an example of extreme "forgetfulness" than of "memory;" though we, of course, should not know that it was such, since we should not know that it had any relation whatever to the past. In "memory," then, there are and must be two distinct elements. The first element is the reproduction before the mind of what has been before it previously, and the second element is the recognition of what is so reproduced as something actually connected with the past. There is yet a further distinction which may be drawn between acts of memory. Every now and then we direct our attention to try and recall something which we know we have for the moment forgotten, and which we instantly recognize when we have managed to recall it to our recollection. But besides this voluntary memory, we are sometimes Recollections startled by the flashing into consciousness of something we had forgotten, and which we were so far from trying to recollect, that we were, when it so flashed into consciousness, thinking of something entirely different. A distinction, then, is to be drawn between those acts of memory in which, by a conscious direction of the will, we search for and find something we desire to recollect, and those acts of memory by which we have a spontaneous, unsought reminiscence in consciousness of some past experience. The former class may be conveniently distinguished and spoken of as "recollections," and the latter as “reminiscences." It is obvious, however, that neither of these kinds of memory can exist without consciousness. No repetition. and remi Certainty of memory involved in self knowledge. Truth of memory cannot be proved. of a feeling is an act of memory unless we are conscious of it as, not only existing, but as also related to the past. The significance and importance of these remarks will appear later.* It was said just now that the supreme certainty of our faculty of memory, is a necessary condition for the recognition even of our own present existence. We can, indeed, have that immediate perception of our own present activity which was declared in the last chapter to be direct and primary, but we cannot obviously have the reflex perception, either of our feelings or of ourselves, without trusting our power of memory as to the past. For, however rapid may be our mental processes, no mental act takes place without occupying some period of time,† and when we turn back the mind to consider the perception "self" or the "feelings" involved in our direct perception of self-action, that perception of self-action is and must be already past. We cannot, therefore, know either a present feeling as being a feeling, or the fact of our own existence as being a persistent existence, without trusting our faculty of memory. As, then, we are with reason most absolutely certain of our own existence" and of our "feelings," it cannot be with less reason that we are also absolutely certain as to the fact of the trustworthiness of our faculty of memory, absolute certainty as to which is necessarily involved in our absolute certainty as to the existence of ourselves and our feelings. These observations are merely offered for the purpose of clearing away any obscurity which may temporarily exist in the reader's mind about a matter, the truth of which will be clearly certain to him when he carefully considers what his own consciousness tells him. Our observations are certainly not offered him as constituting any proof of the veracity of memory, because its veracity is a self-evident truth, and therefore requires no proof. Proof of it is, indeed, impossible, as no process of argument can be carried on except by trusting in memory's veracity. * See below, ch. xiv. No mental act takes place in us without the aid of our nervous system, and the rate at which an influence passes along our nervous system varies according to circumstances, and is always very slow compared with the transit of some physical forces, such as electricity, light, etc. In fact, without trusting memory we could never be certain that any one step taken in a line of argument had been taken, or that the meaning of a proposition, or even of a word, as understood by us at the moment of using it, had the same meaning as it had antecedently had. The trustworthiness of the faculty of memory is, then, one of those things most evidently and supremely true, the search for which was declared in the first chapter to be one of those steps in the pursuit of truth to be taken next after the recognition that such a thing as certainty exists. It is also one of those fundamental facts upon which all our future arguments must be based, and which were, in the same chapter, represented as being at the root of all certainty. fallacy. An objection has been made to this view of the self- A curious evidence of memory's veracity, and it has been very strangely declared that we may trust our faculty of memory, not because its certainty is self-evident, but because we learn its trustworthiness by experience. But any one maintaining such a proposition as this, necessarily contradicts himself flatly. Our past experience can have no value whatever for us if we do not trust our memory, by which alone we can possibly tell that we have had any such experience at all. To doubt the veracity of our faculty of memory destroys the value of all experience whatever, and, therefore, he who would maintain that our certainty as to memory is based on experience, must say in effect that "the faculty of memory being by itself untrustworthy, we learn its trustworthiness by what is untrustworthy also," or, in other words, that "we can never have had that thing (namely, trustworthy experience) by having which we have obtained our knowledge of memory's trustworthiness." Surely never was a contradiction more patent, or a fallacy more obvious! What can be the possible value of any experience which we cannot be certain that any one ever had, and which we ourselves can never have had, since we cannot, by the hypothesis, trust our faculty of memory? How can we ever gain experience if we do not trust memory in gaining it? Particular acts of memory may of course be confirmed by experience if the faculty of D |