THE COGNITIVE CLAIMS OF MEMORY
Belief in memory is implicit in the very rudiments of mind; mind and
memory are indeed names for almost the same thing, since memory
furnishes most of the resources of a mind at all developed, and nothing
is ever in the mind but may reappear in memory, if the psyche can fall
again for a moment into her old paces. Mind and memory alike imply
cognisance taken of outlying things, or knowledge. When the things known
are events within the past experience of the psyche, spontaneously
imagined, knowledge is called memory; it is called mind or intelligence
when they are past, present, or future events in the environment at
large, no matter by what means they are suggested or reported. Memory
itself must report facts or events in the natural world, if it is to be
knowledge and to deserve the name of memory. An intuition by chance
repeating an intuition that had occurred earlier would not be memory or
knowledge of that earlier event. There must be belief in its previous
occurrence, with some indication of its original locus.
Intuition without memory must be assumed to have existed in the
beginning, but such intuition regards essence only. Not being directed
by memory upon the past, nor by animal faith upon the future or upon
external things, pure intuition exercises no sagacity, no transitive
intelligence, and does not think. It is merely the light of awareness
lending actuality to some essence. When identity and duration come to be
attributed to this essence, memory begins to make its claims felt,
although indirectly. When I call an essence identical I imply that I
have considered it twice, and that I possess a true memory of my past
intuition, since I know it presented this very essence. Similarly, when
I call an essence the same, but without distinguishing my two intuitions
of it, which may be continuous, I posit the truth of memory unawares;
for this sensation of living on, of having lived up to the present, is a
primary memory. It sets up a temporal perspective, believing firmly in
its recessional character; parts of the specious present are interpreted
as survivals of a receding present, a present that can never return, but
the vision of which I have not wholly lost. The perspective is not taken
to be specious only, but a true memorial of facts past and gone.
Memory deploys all the items of its inventory at some distance, yet sees
them directly, by a present glance. It makes no difference to the
directness of this knowledge how great the distance of the object may be
in the direction of the past. So also in foresight: I foresee my death
as directly as I do my dinner, not necessarily more vaguely, and far
more certainly. Memory and prophecy do in time what perception does in
space; here too the given essence is projected upon an object remote
from the living psyche which is the organ of the intuition and of the
projection. The object is indeed not remote from the _mind_, if by mind
I understand the intellectual energy of memory, prophecy, or perception
reaching to that object, and positing it there in intent; but it is
remote from the psyche, from the material agent, from me here and now. A
little less or a little more interval of time or space—and there is
always an interval—does not render less ocular and immediate the
description of a removed event by the essences it brings before me. I
see a peewit in the sky as directly as I see the watch in my hand, and I
hear his note as easily as I do the ticking of the watch against my ear.
So I remember the Scotch kilt I wore when a child as directly as the
umbrella I carried this morning. The difficulty in extending the range
of knowledge is physical only; I may be near-sighted; and the mechanism
of memory may break down, or may be choked with parasitic fancies as it
grows old.
In memory it is sometimes possible to reproduce almost exactly some
earlier scene or experience. If the psyche happens to run through the
same process twice—and being material she is compacted of habits—she
will twice have exactly the same intuition; but this precise repetition
of the past, far from constituting a perfect memory, excludes memory.
The sentiment of pastness, the receding perspective in which memory
places its data, will be wanting; and this perfect recovery of
experience will not be remembrance. Nor is any fulness or precision in
the image of the past necessary to the truth of memory. The nerve of
recollection lies elsewhere, in the projection of the given
essence—which may be vague or purely verbal—to a precise point or
nucleus of relations in the natural past. Memory is genuine if the
events it designates actually took place, and conformed to the
description, however brief and abstract, which I give of them. Pictorial
fulness and emotional reversion to the past are not important, and they
are found most often at unimportant points. Healthy memory excludes
them, and for two reasons. The bodily reaction to the old environment is
now hardly possible, and certainly not appropriate; and therefore, even
if the neurogram in the psyche could spring again into perfect life, it
would bring a dream into being, an interruption to life in the present,
rather than a sober memory filling the present appropriately with a long
perspective. The second reason is that the neurogram is likely to have
been modified by the accidents of nutrition and waste intervening, so
that the old movement cannot really be repeated, and the essence called
up will not really be the original one. That it may _seem_ to be the
original, in its very life, is nothing to the purpose. How, if vivid,
should it not seem so, when no other memory exists to control it? But if
I can control it by circumstantial evidence, I usually find that this
specious recovery of past experience is a cheap illusion. If the
reversion to the past seems complete, it is not because the facts are
remembered accurately, but because some subtle influence fills me with a
sentiment wholly foreign to my present circumstances, and redolent of a
remote past; and that dramatic shift seems to lift all the details of
the picture out of the perspective of memory into the foreground of the
present. It is the fancy that comes forward, producing a waking dream,
not the memory that sinks back into an old experience. The scent of a
cedar chest in which old finery is kept may carry me back vividly to my
earliest childhood; but the images that now seem to live again will be
creatures of my present sophisticated and literary fancy; I shall see
them romantically, not with the eyes of a child. I may truly recover
knowledge of long-forgotten facts, but I shall not re-enact a long-past
experience. And what need is there? A miraculous identity may be felt
emotionally even when the two descriptions of the identical thing differ
in _every_ sensible term, as happens in metaphors, in myths, in myself
as body and as mind, in idolatry, or in the doctrine—which expresses a
mystical experience—of transubstantiation. In such cases the vital
reaction, the deeper readjustment of the psyche, to the two appearances
is the same; therefore I feel that the thing appearing in the two ways
is identical, that the one is _really_ the other, however diverse the
two sets of symbols may be.
I have already accepted the belief in memory; indeed, without accepting
it I could not have taken the first step forward from the most
speechless scepticism. But since such acceptance is an act of faith, and
asserts transitive or realistic knowledge, I will pause to consider
somewhat more explicitly what the cognitive claims of memory are, on
which all human beliefs are reared.
The paradox of knowing the absent is posited in the past tenses of the
verb; it is the paradox of knowledge itself, since intuition of essence
is not properly called knowledge; it is imagination, since the only
object present is then non-existent and the description of it, being
creative, is infallible. The claim to knowledge everybody understands
perfectly when he makes it, which he does whenever he perceives,
remembers, or believes anything; but if we wish to paraphrase this claim
reflectively, we may perhaps say that in it attention professes to fall
on an object explicitly at a distance, being framed by other nearer
objects (though at some distance themselves) upon which attention falls
only virtually. If this foreground or frame were absent altogether, I
should live in the pictured past thinking it present; memory would
overleap its memorial office and become a dream. It would cease to be
liable to error, being no longer a report about anything else; but it
would become an idle entertainment, which a moralist might call an
illusion, on the ground that its images were irrelevant to the practice
of rational life, and its emotions wasted. But it would not misrepresent
anything, since in ceasing to be a memory it would have abandoned all
cognitive claims.
A frame or foreground is accordingly indispensable to the projection
which renders a present image a vision of some past fact: I must stand
here to point there. Yet if my present station were explicitly
perceived, if the whole immediate datum were focussed equally in
thought, the picture would seem flat and the perspective merely painted
upon it, as upon a cheap drop-curtain in a theatre. It would destroy the
claim and, if you like, the illusion of memory to remember that I am
remembering; for then I should be considering myself only, and only the
present, whereas in living remembrance I am self-forgetful, and live in
the present thinking only of the past, and observe the past without
supposing that I am living in it. My recollections, my _souvenirs_, are
only essences which I read as I should the characters on this page, not
viewing them contemplatively in their own category as forms present in
their entirety, but accepting them readily (as in all knowledge) as
messengers, as signs for existences of which they furnish but an
imperfect description, for which I am perhaps hopeful of substituting a
better view. In lapsing into the past I seem to myself to be entering a
realm of shadows; and a chief part of my wakefulness, which prevents me
from actually dreaming that I am living in that other world, is
precisely this eagerness of mine to see better, to remember all, to
recover the past as it really was; and the elusive and treacherous
character of such images as come to me troubles me seriously, as a mist
distorting and shutting off the truth. My heart, as it were, is fixed on
that removed reality, and I know that my eyes see it but imperfectly.
Yet if my heart had intuition now of what that reality once was,
recollection would be superfluous, since I should possess all it could
bring me before it brought it; and on the other hand, if my heart did
not know the reality, how could I reject, criticise, or approve the
images that professed to restore its forgotten aspects? Obviously what I
am calling the heart, which is the psyche, is blind in herself:
imagination is her only light, her only language; but she is a prior
principle of choice and judgement and action in the dark; so that when
the light shines in that darkness, she comprehends it, and feels at once
whether the ray falls on the object towards which she was groping, or on
some irrelevant thing. The psyche, in the case of memory, contains all
the seeds, all the involutions and latent habits, which the past left
there in passing; any one of these may be released freely, or only
irritated and summoned to activity without being sufficiently fed, or
only to be at once thwarted and contradicted; and the _sentiment_ of
this prosperous or mutilated rendering of experience, when memory
proffers its images, enables the psyche to judge these images to be true
or false, adequate or inadequate, without possessing any other images
with which to compare them.
This felt imperfection of memory is no obstacle to the directness of
such knowledge as it does afford. Memory, however vague, transports me
to the intended scene; I walk by its wavering light through those
ancient chambers; I see again (incorrectly, no doubt) what occurred
there. But if many a detail once obvious is thereby lost or misplaced,
memory may see the chief features of the past in a truer perspective
than that in which experience placed them originally. The ghostliness of
memory carries this compensation with it, comparable to the breadth of
sympathy that compensates old age for the loss of vivaciousness; memory
is a reconstruction, not a relapse. The view which the opened chest
creates in me now of my family history may be truer than any I had when
a child. My perceptions when a child were themselves descriptions,
naïve, disjointed, limited. In reproducing my past perceptions, my
dreaming memory does not regard those perceptions—perceptions being
spiritual facts, can become objects of intent only. Memory regards the
same objects (essences or things) which the past perceptions regarded.
But the soil in which these intuitions now grow has been tilled and
watered, and, even if a little exhausted, it may yield a fairer
description of those ancient incidents than existed before, more
voluminous, better knit, more knowing. Memory has fundamentally the same
function as history and science—to review things more intelligently than
they were ever viewed. Mind would never rise out of the most helpless
animal routine if it could not forget in remembering, and could not
substitute a moral perspective for the infinite flatness of physical
experience. That much drops out is a blessing; that something creeps in,
by way of idealisation, hyperbole, and legend, is not an unmixed evil.
In spite of this admixture of fiction, memory, legend, and science
achieve a true intellectual dominion over the flux of events; and they
add a poetic life and rhythm of their own, like the senses.
This possibility of dominion proves that the images and the apperception
involved in remembering are fresh images and a fresh apperception. It
shows also that the later station in time of the act of remembering in
no way annuls the directness of the knowledge involved, nor cuts it off
from its object; on the contrary, the object being posited and chosen by
the psyche before any images or any apperception arise, these are free
to describe that object in any way they can, bringing all later
resources of the mind to illustrate it, and thereby perhaps describing
it far more truly than the senses revealed it when it was present.
Here an important detail has come into view which at first sight might
seem paradoxical, but only because the paucity of language obliges us
often to use the same word for very different things. Thus it seems
natural to say that a man may remember his own experience, and can
remember nothing else; and yet it is not his _experience_ that he
commonly remembers at all, but the usual object of his memory is the
object of his former experience, the events or the situation in which
his earlier experience occurred. Experience is intuition, it is
discourse interspersed with shocks and recapitulated; but intuition,
actual experience, is not an object of any possible intuition or
experience, being, as I have said above, a spiritual fact. Its existence
can be discovered only by moral imagination, and posited dramatically,
as the experience proper to spirit under certain real or imaginary
circumstances. And this is true of my own past or future, no less than
of the experience of others. When I remember I do not _look at_ my past
experience, any more than when I think of a friend’s misfortunes I look
at his thoughts. I imagine them; or rather I imagine something of my own
manufacture, as if I were writing a novel, and I attribute this intuited
experience to myself in the past, or to the other person. Naturally, I
can impute only such feelings as my present psyche can evoke; and she,
although creative, creates automatically and in accordance with patterns
fixed by habit or instinct; so that it is true, in a loose way, that I
can remember or conceive only what I have experienced; but this is not
because my experience itself remains within me, and can be re-observed.
Such a notion needs but to be made clear to be made ridiculous. Living
intuition cannot be preserved; and even while it lives, it cannot be
found. It is spiritual.
Recollection is accordingly incipient dreaming; it views the same
objects as the experience did which it rehearses, since the memory
arises by a renewal of the very process in the psyche by which that
experience was created originally. The psyche, in so far as she is
occupied with that dream, does not know that it is a memory, nor that
its objects are remote and perhaps no longer exist; she posits them with
all the confidence of action, as in any other dream. Yet in normal
memory the illusion is controlled and corrected, and the experience
actually given, with all its posited objects, is relegated to the past;
because this time it is framed in another experience, with more
obstinate objects and an environment to which the body is adjusted,
incompatible with the remembered environment. Hence the shadowy,
vaporous, unreal aspect of the remembered past: images chase one another
through it, as they chase one another sometimes in a cinema, or as in a
dream what was just now a white-capped wave may become a horse
galloping. Meantime reason rides the storm of seething incipient
fancies, anchored in the outer senses by the steady pull of the
instincts which bind it to the present world.
Experience cannot be remembered, a perception cannot be perceived nor
re-perceived. This fact explains both the directness of memory (since it
regards the same objects, the same environment, as the old experience,
and repeats the same emotions), and also the ghostliness of memory and
of all imagination (since the beliefs and emotions evoked are irrelevant
to the present world, and inhibited by peremptory present reactions).
There is a great difference conventionally between memory and fancy,
between history and fiction, and the two things diverge widely in their
physical significance, one regarding events in nature and the other
imaginary scenes; nevertheless psychologically they are clearly akin. It
is only by an ulterior control that we can distinguish which sort of
fancy is memory and which sort of fiction is historical. This control,
for the immediate past, is exercised by habit and sensation. The
immediate past is continuous with the present; I believe that I
remember, and do not merely imagine, the street in which I live, because
I am ready to walk out into it confidently, and by raising my eyes can
see it out of the window. It is an object continuous with the recurrent
objects of my present faith. When the past is more remote, this control,
while the same in principle, is less directly exercised; it is mainly
the _habit_ of memory that testifies to the truth of memory. I believe I
remember, and do not merely imagine, what I have always said I
remembered; just as we believe events to be historical and not invented,
when historians have always repeated them. It is consequently very easy
for a fiction, once incorporated in what, because of our practical
habits, we regard as real events, to pass for a fact for ever.
Autobiographies and religions (even when not systematically recast by
the fancy, as they usually are) contain many such involuntary
confusions. _Vice versa_, a lively fiction spontaneously takes the form
of a history or a memory. Although no junction with genuine memory or
history may be attempted in _Robinson Crusoe_ at the beginning or at the
end, many a real fact may be woven into the narrative, to add to its
verisimilitude, and absorb, as it were, the fancied details into the
romantic medley of things commonly believed. “Once upon a time,” says
the story-teller, in order vaguely to graft his imaginary events on to
the tree of memory; and in the _Thousand and One Nights_ we are
transported to one of the cities amongst cities, or to an island amongst
the isles of the sea; whereby the fiction grows more arresting, or the
real world more marvellous and large.
Criticism of memory and history is a ticklish and often a comic matter,
because only fancy can be employed to do it; and we judge the authority
of records and the reports of our past experience by the criterion of
what, at the present moment, can exercise a decided suasion over our
belief, and create a living illusion. But the principle by which we
trust memory at all is always the same, and deeply paradoxical. How can
a flux be observed at all? If flux there be, the earlier part is gone
when the latter part appears: how then can the relation, the passage, be
observed? And where is the observation? If it occupies each instant in
turn, how can it bridge them? If it stands outside, how can it touch any
of them? In any case the observation would seem to be out of the flux
which it imagines, but does not undergo: for if its being is
instantaneous, there is no flux in it; and if it is comprehensive, and
contemporary with all the instants surveyed, again it endures no change.
Indeed, analytically, it is obvious that a sense of change, falling
necessarily under a unity of apperception, transcends _that_ change,
however changeful may be the conditions of its own genesis: mind, by its
very character as mind, is timeless. Is time, then, merely a picture of
time, and can it be nothing else? And is flux, which is an essential
quality of existence, only a mere appearance, and essentially incapable
of existing in fact?
There is danger here of an enormous illusion, into which I think the
most redoubtable metaphysicians have fallen. We must admit that spirit
is not in time, that the perception of flux (or of anything else) is not
a flux, but a synthetic glance and a single intuition of relation, of
form, of quality. The seen is everywhere a universal, the seeing is
everywhere supernatural. But this admission is far from involving a
denial of flux—a denial, that is, of the deliverance of this very spirit
to which we are assigning such pompous prerogatives. The one prerogative
which we must assume spirit to possess—because we claim it in exercising
spirit at all—is that it _understands_, that it tells truly something
about something. Its own conditions of being, that it must be
immaterial, timeless, synthetic, intuitive, do not preclude it, if it is
truly intelligent, from revealing things differently constituted from
itself: much less can it prevent these non-spiritual things from
existing. What madness is this, because we may at last discern the
spirituality of spirit, to deny that there could ever have been anything
for spirit to discern? Why stultify the very faculty we are discovering
that we possess? Why tumble in this way head over heels from our little
eminence, and reduce ourselves to speechlessness in wonder at our
capacity to speak? This supernatural status and super-temporal scope of
spirit are not prerogatives; they are deprivations; they are sacrificial
conditions, from the point of view of natural existence, to which any
faculty must submit, if it is to understand. Of course understanding is
itself an achievement (though not all philosophers esteem it highly),
but it must be bought at a price: at the price of escaping into a fourth
dimension, of not being that which we understand. So when the flux, in
its rumble and perpetual superposition of movements, remembers that it
flows, it is not arrested materially; but the sense that what flows
through it at this instant has come from afar, that it has taken a fresh
shape, and is hurrying to new transformations, has itself eluded that
fate: for this sense, as distinguished from the psyche that exercises
it, is tangential to the flux it surveys, neither instantaneous nor
prolonged, but simply intelligent. How far into the past or future its
glance may reach, is a matter of accident, and of the range of
adjustments at that moment in the psyche. But spirit is virtually
omniscient: barriers of space and time do not shut it in; they are but
the boundary-stones of field and field in its landscape. It is ready to
survey all time and all existence if, by establishing some electric
connection with its seat, time and existence will consent to report
themselves to it. For spirit has no interests, no curiosity, no animal
impatience; and as it arises only when and where nature calls it forth,
so it surveys only what nature happens to spread before it.