l88 MATTER AND MEMORY CHAP- "' to the rest of the chain. — But, if we look at the matter nearly, we shall see that our memories form a chain of the same kind, and that our char acter, always present in all our decisions, is indeed the actual synthesis of all our past states. In this epitomized form our previous psychical life exists for us even more than the external world, of which we never perceive more than a very small part, whereas on the contrary we use the whole of our lived experience. It is true that we possess merely a digest of it, and that our former percep tions, considered as distinct individualities, seem to us to have completely disappeared, or to appear again only at the bidding of their caprice.
But this semblance of complete destruction or of capricious revival is due merely to the fact that actual consciousness accepts at each moment the useful, and rejects in the same breath the super fluous. Ever bent upon action, it can only ma terialize those of our former perceptions which can ally themselves with the present perception to take a share in the final decision. If it is neces sary, when I would manifest my will at a given point of space, that my consciousness should go successively through those intermediaries or those obstacles of which the sum constitutes what we call distance in space, so on the other hand it is useful, in order to throw light on this action, that my con sciousness should jump the interval of time which separates the actual situation from a former one which resembles it; and as consciousness goes CHAP, iii EXISTENCE 189 back to the earlier date at a bound, all the inter mediate past escapes its hold. The same reasons, then, which bring about that our perceptions range themselves in strict continuity in space, cause our memories to be illumined discontinuously in time. We have not, in regard to objects unperceived in space and unconscious memories in time, to do with two radically different forms of existence; but the exigencies of action are the inverse in the one case of what they are in the other.
But here we come to the capital problem of existence, a problem we can only glance at, for Existence im- otherwise it would lead us step by step mt° *he neart of metaphysics. We will merely say that with regard to matters °^ experience — which alone concern us nere — existence appears to imply two either. conditions taken together: (i) presenta tion in consciousness; and (2) the logical or causal connexion of that which is so presented with what precedes and with what follows. The reality for us of a psychical state or of a material object consists in the double fact that our consciousness perceives them and that they form part of a series, temporal or spatial, of which the elements determine each other. But these two conditions admit of degrees, and it is conceiv able that, though both are necessary, they may be unequally fulfilled. Thus, in the case of actual internal states, the connexion is less close, and the determination of the present by the past, leav- IQO MATTER AND MEMORY CHAP, ni ing ample room for contingency, has not the character of a mathematical derivation; — but then, presentation in consciousness is perfect, an actual psychical state yielding the whole of its content in the act itself whereby we perceive it. On the contrary, if we are dealing with external objects it is the connexion which is perfect, since these objects obey necessary laws; but then the other condition, presentation in con sciousness, is never more than partially fulfilled, for the material object, just because of the multi tude of unperceived elements by which it is linked with all other objects, appears to enfold within itself and to hide behind it infinitely more than it allows to be seen. — We ought to say, then, that existence, in the empirical sense of the word, always implies conscious apprehension and regular connexion; both at the same time but in different degrees. But our intellect, of which the function is to establish clear-cut distinctions, does not so understand things. Rather than admit the presence in all cases of the two elements mingled The fallacy in varving proportions, it prefers to dis- dissociate them, and thus attribute tingvushmg two kinds of to external objects on the one hand, and existence characterized to internal states on the other, two radithe one by conscious:ally different modes of existence, each apprehension, and the other characterized by the exclusive presence of by regular connexion. the condition which should be regarded as merely preponderating. Then the existence of psychical states is assumed to consist entirely in CHAP in. RELATION OF PAST AND PRESENT IQI their apprehension by consciousness, and that of ex ternal phenomena, entirely also, in the strict order of their concomitance and their succession. Whence the impossibility of leaving to material objects, existing, but unperceived, the smallest share in consciousness, and to internal unconscious states the smallest share in existence. We have shown, at the beginning of this book, the consequences of the first illusion: it ends by falsifying our representation of matter. The second, comple mentary to the first, vitiates our conception of mind by casting over the idea of the unconscious an artificial obscurity. The whole of our past psychical life conditions our present state, with out being its necessary determinant; whole, also, it reveals itself in our character, although no one of its past states manifests itself explicitly in character. Taken together, these two con ditions assure to each one of the past psychological states a real, though an unconscious, existence.
But we are so much accustomed to reverse, for the sake of action, the real order of things, But, if mem- we are so strongly obsessed by images "s1*6" drawn from space, that we cannot hin-^er ourselves from asking where memories are stored up. We understand the Question, ^hat physico-chemical phenomena take place in the brain, that the brain is in the body, the body in the air which surrounds it, etc.; but the past, once achieved, if it is retained, where is it? To locate it in the cerebral suba IQ2 MATTER AND MEMORY CHAP, in stance, in the state of molecular modification, seems clear and simple enough, because then we have a receptacle, actually given, which we have only to open in order to let the latent images flow into consciousness. But if the brain cannot serve such a purpose, in what warehouse shall we store the accumulated images? — We forget that the relation of container to content borrows its apparent clearness and universality from the necessity laid upon us of always opening out space in front of us, and of always closing duration be hind us. Because it has been shown that one thing is within another, the phenomenon of its preserva tion is not thereby made any clearer. We may even go further: let us admit for a moment that the past survives in the form of a memory stored in the brain; it is then necessary that the brain, in order to preserve the memory, should pre serve itself. But the brain, in so far as it is an image extended in space, never occupies more than the present moment: it constitutes, with all the rest of the material universe, an ever renewed section of universal becoming. Either, then, you must suppose that this universe dies and is born again miraculously at each moment of dura tion, or you must attribute to it that continuity of existence which you deny to consciousness, and make of its past a reality which endures and is. pro longed into its present. So that you have gained nothing by depositing the memories in matter, and you find yourself, on the contrary, compelled CHAP, in RELATION OF PAST AND PRESENT 193 to extend to the totality of the states of the ma terial world that complete and independent sur vival of the past which you have just refused to psychical states. This survival of the past per se forces itself upon philosophers, then, under one form or another; and the difficulty that we have in conceiving it comes simply from the fact that we extend to the series of memories, in time, that obligation of containing and being contained which appHes only to the collection of bodies instantaneously perceived in space. The funda mental illusion consists in transferring to dura tion itself, in its continuous flow, the form of the instantaneous sections which we make in it.
But how can the past, which, by hypothesis, has ceased to be, preserve itself? Have we not here a real contradiction? — We reply Dot ceased to that the question is just whether the exist; it has., only ceased past has ceased to exist or whether it has simply ceased to be useful. You define the present in an arbitrary manner as that which is, whereas the present is simply what is being made. Nothing is less than the present moment, if you understand by that the indivisible limit which divides the past from the future. When we think this present as going to be, it exists not yet; and when we think it as existing, it is already past. If, on the other hand, what you are considering is the concrete present such as it is act ually lived by consciousness, we may say that this present consists, in large measure, in the immediate o 194 MATTER AND MEMORY CHAP, ni past. In the fraction of a second which covers the briefest possible perception of light, billions of vibrations have taken place, of which the first is separated from the last by an interval which is enormously divided. Your perception, however instantaneous, consists then in an incalculable multitude of remembered elements; and in truth every perception is already memory. Practically we perceive only the past, the pure present being the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future.
Consciousness, then, illumines, at each moment of tune, that immediate part of the past which, impending over the future, seeks to realize and to associate with it. Solely preoccupied in thus determining an undetermined future, con sciousness may shed a little of its light on those of our states, more remote in the past, which can be usefully combined with our present state, that is to say, with our immediate past: the rest remains in the dark. It is in this illuminated part of our history that we remain seated, in virtue of the fundamental law of life, which is a law of action: hence the difficulty we experience in con ceiving memories which are preserved in the shadow. Our reluctance to admit the integral survival of the past has its origin, then, in the very bent of our psychical life, — an unfolding of states wherein our interest prompts us to look at that which is unrolling, and not at that which is entirely unrolled.
CHAP, in RELATION OF PAST AND PRESENT IQ5 So we return, after a long digression, to our point of departure. There are, we have said, two The two memories which are profoundly distinct: the one> fixed in the organism, is nothing else but the complete set of •uppoXdthe intelligently constructed mechanisms other> which ensure the appropriate reply to the various possible demands. This memory enables us to adapt ourselves to the present situa tion; through it the actions to which we are sub ject prolong themselves into reactions that are sometimes accomplished, sometimes merely nas cent, but always more or less appropriate. Habit rather than memory, it acts our past experience but does not call up its image. The other is the true memory. Co-extensive with consciousness, it retains and ranges alongside of each other all our states in the order in which they occur, leaving to each fact its place and consequently marking its date, truly moving in the past and not, like the first, in an ever renewed present. But, in marking the profound distinction between these two forms of memory, we have not shown their connecting link. Above the body, with its mechanisms which symbolize the accumulated effort of past actions, the memory which ima gines and repeats has been left to hang, as it were, suspended in the void. Now, if it be true that we never perceive anything but our immediate past, if our consciousness of the present is already memory, the two terms which had been separated to begin with cohere closely together. Seen from this new point of view, indeed, our body is nothing but that part of our representation which is ever being born again, the part always present, or rather that which at each moment is just past. Itself an image, the body cannot store up images, since it forms a part of the images; and this is why it is a chimerical enterprise to seek to localize past or even present perceptions in the brain: they are not in it; it is the brain that is in them. But this special image which persists in the midst of the others, and which I call my body, constitutes at every moment, as we have said, a section of the universal becoming. It is then the place of passage of the movements received and thrown back, a hyphen, a connecting link between the things which act upon me and the things upon which I act, — the seat, in a word, of the sensorimotor phenomena. If I represent by a cone SAB the totality of the recollections accumulated in my memory, the base AB, situated in the past, remains motionless, while the summit S, which indicates at all times my present, moves forward unceasingly, and unceasingly also touches the moving plane P of my actual representation of the universe. At S the image of the body is concentrated; and, since it belongs to the plane P, this image does but receive and restore actions emanating from all the images of which the plane is composed.
CHAP, ni RELATION OF PAST AND PRESENT IQ7 The bodily memory, made up of the sum of the sensori-motor systems organized by habit, is then a quasi-instantaneous mem ory to which the true memory of the past serves as base. Since they are not two separ ate things, since the first is only, as we have said, the pointed end, ever moving, inserted by the second in the shifting plane of experience,it is natural that the two functions should lend each other a mutual support. So, on the one hand, the memory of the past offers to the sensori-motor mechanisms all the recollections capable of guiding them in their task and of giv ing to the motor reaction the direction suggested by the lessons of experience. It is in just this that the associations of contiguity and likeness consist. But, on the other hand, the sensori-motor apparatus furnish to ineffective, that is uncon scious, memories, the means of taking on a body, of materializing themselves, in short of becoming present. For, that a recollection should reappear in consciousness, it is necessary that it should descend from the heights of pure memory down to the precise point where action is taking place. In other words, it is from the present that comes the appeal to which memory responds, and it is from the sensori-motor elements of present action that a memory borrows the warmth which gives it life.
Is it not by the constancy of this agreement, by the precision with which these two comple mentary memories insert themselves •oood sense' each into the other, that we recognize a consists main- o X "*.m*king ' well-balanced ' mind, that is to say, the right use J ' of spontan- m fact, a man nicely adapted to life?
eons memory, J The characteristic of the man of action is the promptitude with which he summons to the help of a given situation all the mem ories which have reference to it; but it is also the insurmountable barrier which encounter, when they present themselves on the threshold of his con sciousness, memories that are useless or indiffer ent. To live only in the present, to respond to a stimulus by the immediate reaction which prolongs it, is the mark of the lower animals: the man who proceeds in this way is a man of im pulse. But he who lives in the past for the mere pleasure of living there, and in whom recollections emerge into the light of consciousness without any advantage for the present situation, is hardly better fitted for action: here we have no man of impulse, but a dreamer. Between these two extremes lies the happy disposition of a memory docile enough to follow with precision all the outlines of the present situation, but ener getic enough to resist all other appeal. Good sense, or practical sense, is probably nothing but this.
The extraordinary development of spontaneous memory in most children is due to the fact that CHAP, in RELATION OF PAST AND PRESENT 199 they have not yet persuaded their memory to remain bound up with their conduct. They usually follow the impression of the moment, and as with them action does not bow to the suggestions of memory, so neither are their recol lections limited to the necessities of action. They seem to retain with greater facility only because they remember with less discernment. The apparent diminution of memory, as intellect developes, is then due to the growing organi zation of recollections with acts. Thus con scious memory loses in range what it gains in force of penetration: it had at first the facility of the memory of dreams, but then it was actually dreaming. Indeed we observe this same exaggeration of spontaneous mem ory in men whose intellectual development hardly goes beyond that of childhood. A mis sionary, after preaching a long sermon to some African savages, heard one of them repeat it textually, with the same gestures, from beginning to end.1 But, if almost the whole of our past is hidden from us because it is inhibited by the necessities of present action, it will find strength to cross the threshold of consciousness in all cases where we renounce the interests of effective action to replace ourselves, so to speak, in the life of dreams. Sleep, natural or artificial, brings about an indifference 1 Kay, Memory and How to Improve it. New York, 1888, p. 18.
2OO MATTER AND MEMORY CHAP, in of just this kind. It has been recently suggested that in sleep there is an interruption of the con tact between the nervous elements, motor and sensory.1 Even if we do not accept this in genious hypothesis, it is impossible not to see in sleep a relaxing, even if only functional, of the tension of the nervous system, ever ready, Baring waking hours, to prolong by an appropriate reaction the stimulation received. Now the exalta tion of the memory in certain dreams and in cer tain somnambulistic states is well known. Mem ories which we believed abolished then reappear with striking completeness; we live over again, in all their detail, forgotten scenes of childhood; we speak languages which we no longer even remember to have learnt. But there is nothing more instructive in this regard than what hap pens in cases of sudden suffocation, in men drowned or hanged. The man, when brought to life again, states that he saw, in a very short time, all the forgotten events of his life passing before him with, great rapidity, with their smallest circumstances and in the very order in which they occurred.* 1 Mathias Duval, Theorie histologique du sommeil (C. R. de la Soc. de Biologie, 1895, p. 74). Cf. Lepine, ibid., p. 85 and Revue de Medecine, Aug. 1894, and especially Pupin, Le neurone et les hypotheses histologiques, Paris, 1896.
2 Forbes Winslow, Obscure Diseases of the Brain, p. 25 et Seq. — Ribot, Maladies de la memoir e, p. 139 et seq. — Mauro, Le sommeil et les reves, Paris, 1878, p. 439. — Egger, Lc moi des mouiants (Revue philosophique, Jan. and Oct. 1896).— CHAP, m MEMORY AND GENERAL IDEAS 2OI A human being who should dream his life in stead of living it would no doubt thus keep before spontaneous his eyes at each moment the infinite muldiffer- titude of the details of his past history. 8 And, on the other hand, the man who should repudiate this memory with all place arises that it begets would be continually idea. acting his life instead of truly repre senting it to himself: a conscious automaton, he would follow the lead of useful habits which prolong into an appropriate reaction the stimula tion received. The first would never rise above the particular, or even above the individual; leaving to each image its date in time and its position in space, he would see wherein it differs from others and not how it resembles them. The other, always swayed by habit, would only dis tinguish in any situation that aspect in which it practically resembles former situations; incapable, doubtless, of thinking universals, since every general idea implies the representation, at least virtual, of a number of remembered images, he would nevertheless move in the universal, habit being to action what generality is to thought. But these two extreme states, the one of an entirely contemplative memory which appre hends only the singular in its vision, the other of a purely motor memory which stamps the note Cf. Ball's dictum: ' Memory is a faculty which loses nothing and records everything.' (Quoted by Rouillard, Les amnesics [medical thesis], Paris, 1885, p. 25.)
2O2 MATTER AND MEMORY CHAP, m of generality on its action, are really apart and are fully visible only in exceptional cases. In normal life they are interpenetrating, so that each has to abandon some part of its original purity. The first reveals itself in the recollection of differences, the second in the perception of resemblances: at the meeting of the two currents appears the general idea.
We are not here concerned to settle once for all the whole question of general ideas. Some there are that have not originated in perception alone, and that have but a very distant connexion with material objects. We will leave these on one side, and consider only those general ideas that are founded on what we have called the perception of similarity. We will try to follow pure memory, integral memory, in the continuous effort which it makes to insert itself into motor habit. In this way we may throw more light upon the office and nature of this memory, and perhaps make clearer, at the same time, by regarding them in this particular aspect, the two equally obscure notions of resemblance and of generality.
If we consider as closely as possible the diffi culties of a psychological order which surround the problem of general ideas, we shall Nominalism IT,., - and concep- come, we believe, to enclose them in revolve in a this circle: to generalize, it is first of leading back all necessary to abstract, but to abstract to the other..,.
to any purpose we must already know CHAP, m MEMORY AND GENERAL IDEAS 2O3 how to generalize. Round this circle gravitate, consciously or unconsciously, nominalism and conceptualism, each doctrine having in its fav our mainly the insufficiency of the other. The nominalists, retaining of the general idea only its extension, see in it merely an open and unlimited series of individual objects. The unity of the idea can then, for them, consist only in the identity of the symbol by which we designate indiffer ently all these distinct objects. According to them, we begin by perceiving a thing, and then we assign to it a word: this word, backed by the faculty or the habit of extending itself to an unlimited number of other things, then sets up for a general idea. But, in order that the word should extend and yet limit itself to the objects which it designates, it is necessary that these objects should offer us resemblances which, when we compare them, shall distinguish them from all the objects to which the word does not apply. Generalization does not, consequently, occur without our taking into account qualities that have been found to be common and there fore considered in the abstract; and from step to step, nominalism is thus led to define the general idea by its intension and not merely by its exten sion, as it set out to do. It is just from this in tension that conceptualism starts; the intellect, on this theory, resolves the superficial unity of the individual into different qualities, each of which, isolated from the individual which limited it, be- 204 MATTER AND MEMORY CHAP. m.
comes by that very isolation representative of a genus. Instead of regarding each genus as includ ing actually a multiplicity of objects, it is now main tained, on the contrary, that each object involves potentially, and as so many qualities which it holds captive, a multiplicity of genera. But the ques tion before us is whether individual qualities, even isolated by an effort of abstraction, do not remain individual; and whether, to make them into genera, a new effort of the mind is not re quired, by which it first bestows on each quality a name, and then collects under this name a multitude of individual objects. The whiteness of a lily is not the whiteness of a snow-field; they remain, even as isolated from the snow and the Uly, snow-white or lily-white. They only forego their individuality if we consider their likeness in order to give them a common name; then, apply ing this name to an unlimited number of similar objects, we throw back upon the quality, by a sort of ricochet, the generality which the word went out to seek in its application to things. But, reasoning in this way, do we not return to the point of view of extension, which we just now abandoned? We are then, in truth, revolving in a circle, nominalism leading us to conceptualism, and conceptualism bringing us back to nominalism.
Generalization can only be effected by extracting common qualities; but, that qualities should appear common, they must have already been subjected to a process of generalization.
CHAP ni. MEMORY AND GENERAL IDEAS 2O5 Now, when we get to the bottom of these two opposite theories, we find in them a common postulate; each will have it that we start from the perception of individual objects. The first composes the genus by an enumeration; the second disengages it by an analysis; but it is upon individuals, considered as so many realities given to immediate intuition, that both analysis and enumeration are supposed to bear. This is the postulate. In spite of its apparent obvious ness, we must expect to find, and we do indeed find, that experience belies it.
A priori, indeed, we may expect the clear dis tinction of individual objects to be a luxury of perception, just as the clear repre- The clear f. ' J...perception oi sentation of general ideas is a refinement objects and of the intellect. The full conception the clear..,,, conception oi of genera is no doubt proper to human te thought; it demands an effort of reflexdevelopment. -,,., r ion, by which we expunge from a repre sentation the details of time and place. But the re flexion on these details — a reflexion without which the individuality of objects would escape us — pre supposes a faculty of noticing differences, and therefore a memory of images, which is certainly the privilege of man and of the higher animals. It would seem, then, that we start neither from the perception of the individual nor from the conception of the genus, but from an inter mediate knowledge, from a confused sense of the striking quality or of resemblance: this sense, equally remote from generality fully conceived and from individuality clearly perceived, begets them both by a process of dissociation. Reflective analysis clarifies it into the general idea; dis criminative memory solidifies it into a perception of the individual.
But this will be more clearly evident if we go back to the purely utilitarian origin of our per ception of things. That which interests us in a given situation, that which we are likely to grasp in it first, is the side by which it can respond to a tendency or a need. But a need goes straight to the resemblance or quality; it cares little for individual differences. To this discernment of the useful we may surmise that the perception of animals is, in most cases, confined. It is grass in general which attracts the herbivorous animal: the colour and the smell of grass, felt and ex perienced as forces, (we do not go so far as to say, thought as qualities or genera) are the sole immediate data of its external perception. On this For the background of generality or of resem-°lance the animal's memory may show UP contrasts from which will issue differentiations; it will then distinguish one countryside from another, one field from another field; but this is, we repeat, the super fluity of perception, not a necessary part. It may be urged that we are only throwing the problem further back, that we are merely relegating to the unconscious the process by which similarity CHAP, in MEMORY AND GENERAL IDEAS 2O7