the cells of the cortex: it would be wonderful indeed that disease should always attack these cells in the same order.1 But the fact can be explained, if we admit that memories need, for their actualization, a motor ally, and that they require for their recall a kind of mental attitude which must itself be engrafted upon an attitude of the body. If such be the case, verbs in gene ral, which essentially express imitable actions, are precisely the words that a bodily effort might enable us to recapture when the function of language has all but escaped us: proper names, on the other hand, being of all words the most remote from those impersonal actions which our body can sketch out, are those which a weaken ing of the function will earliest affect. It is a noteworthy fact that the aphasic patient, who has become as a rule incapable of finding the noun he seeks, may replace it by an appropriate periphrasis into which other nouns,2 and perhaps even the evasive noun itself, enter. Unable to think of the precise word, he has thought of the corresponding action, and this attitude has determined the general direction of a movement from which the phrase then springs. So likewise it may happen to any of us. that, having retained the initial of a forgotten name, we recover the name by repeating the 1 Wundt, Grundzuge der physiologische Psychologic. Leipzig, 1903, vol i, 314-315.
2 Bernard, De Vaphasie. Paris, 1889, pp. 171 and 174.
CHAP. H REALIZATION OF MEMORIES IJ3 initial.1 — Therefore, in facts of the second kind, it is the function that is attacked as a whole, and in those of the first kind the forgetting, though in appearance more complete, is never really final. Neither in the one case nor in the other do we find memories localized in certain cells of the cerebral substance and abolished by their destruction.
But let us question our own consciousness, and ask of it what happens when we listen to the words whatintro- °f another person with the desire to to?ayoii1the understand them. Do we passively wait for the impressions to go in search of their images? Do we not rather feel that we are adopting a certain disposition which varies with our interlocutor, with the language he speaks, with the nature of the ideas which he expresses, — and varies, above all, with the general movement of his phrase, as though we were choos ing the key in which our own intellect is called upon to play? The motor diagram, emphasizing his utterance, following through all its windings the curve of his thought, shows our thought the road. It is the empty vessel, which determines, by its form, the form which the fluid mass, rush ing into it, already tends to take.
But psychologists may be unwilling to explain 1 Graves cites the case of a patient who had forgotten all names but remembered their initial, and by that means was able to recover them (quoted by Bernard, De I'aphasie, p. 179).
154 MATTER AND MEMORY CHAP, n in this way the mechanism of interpretation, current errors because of the invincible tendency which Surtare impels us to think on all occasions of teundencyeoi things rather than of movements. We to have said that we start from the idea, and that we develop it into auditory movement, memory-images capable of inserting themselves in the motor diagram, so as to over lie the sounds we hear. We have here a con tinuous movement, by which the nebulosity of the idea is condensed into distinct auditory images, which, still fluid, will be finally solidified as they coalesce with the sounds materially perceived At no moment is it possible to say with precision that the idea or the memory-image ends, that the memory-image or the sensation begins. And, in fact, where is the dividing line between the confu sion of sounds perceived in the lump and the clear ness which the remembered auditory images add to them, between the discontinuity of these remem bered images themselves and the continuity of the original idea which they dissociate and refract into distinct words? But scientific thought, analysing this unbroken series of changes, and yielding to an irresistible need of symbolic present ment, arrests and solidifies into finished things the principal phases of this development. It erects the crude sounds heard into separate and complete words, then the remembered auditory images into entities independent of the idea they develop: these three terms, crude perception, auditory image CHAP, it REALIZATION OF MEMORIES 155 and idea, are thus made into distinct wholes of which each is supposed to be self-sufficing. And while, if we really confined ourselves to pure experience, the idea is what we should start from — since it is to the idea that the auditory memories owe their connexion and since it is by the memo ries that the crude sounds become completed, — on the contrary, when once we have arbitrarily supposed the crude sound to be by itself com plete, and arbitrarily also assumed the memories to be connected together, we see no harm in re versing the real order of the processes, and in asserting that we go from the perception to the memories and from the memories to the idea. Nevertheless, we cannot help feeling that we must bring back again, under one form or another, at one moment or another, the continuity which we have thus broken between the perception, the mem ory and the idea. So we make out that these three things, each lodged in a certain portion of the cortex or of the medulla, intercommunicate, the percep tions going to awaken the auditory memories, and the memories going to rouse up the ideas. As we have begun by solidifying into distinct and independent things what were only phases — the main phases— of a continuous development, we go on materializing the development itself into lines of communication, contacts and impulsions. But not with impunity can we thus invert the true order, and as a necessary consequence, intro duce into each term of the series elements which 15^ MATTER AND MEMORY e»A*. it are only realized by those that follow. Not with impunity, either, can we congeal into distinct and independent things the fluidity of a continuous undivided process. This symbolism may indeed suffice as long as it is strictly limited to the facts which jhave served to invent it: but each new fact will force us to complicate our diagram, to in sert new stations along the line of the movement; and yet all these stations laid side by side will never be able to reconstitute the movement itself. Nothing is more instructive, in this regard, than the history of the diagrams of sensory apha sia. In the early period, marked by Illustrations, _. Tr J from the the work of Charcot,1 Broadbent,2 Kuss- theories oi maul 3 and Lichtheim,4 the theorists confined themselves to the hypothesis of an ' ideational centre ' linked by transcortical paths to the various speech centres. But, as the analysis of cases was pushed further, this centre for ideas receded and finally disap peared. For, while the physiology of the brain was more and more successful in localizing sensa tions and movements, but never ideas, the diversity of sensory aphasias obliged clinicians to break up 2 Broadbent, A Case of Peculiar Affection of Speech (Brain, 1879, p. 494).
8 Kussmaul, Die Stdrungen der Sprache. Leipzig, 1877, p. 182.
4 Lichtheim, On Aphasia (Brain, 1885). Yet we must note the fact that Wernicke, the first to study sensory aphasia methodically, was able to do without a centre for concepts (Der aphasische Symptomencotnplex. Breslau, 1874).
CHAP. ii. REALIZATION OF MEMORIES 157 the intellectual centre into a growing multiplicity of image centres — a centre for visual representa tions, for tactile representations, for auditory representations, etc., — nay, to divide sometimes into two different tracks, the one ascending and the other descending, the line of communication between any two of them.1 This was the charac teristic feature of the diagrams of the later period, those of Wysman,8 of Moeli,8 of Freud,4 etc. Thus the theory grew more and more compli cated, yet without ever being able to grasp the full complexity of reality. And as the diagrams became more complicated, they figured and sug gested the possibility of lesions which, just because they were more diverse, were more special and more simple, the complication of the diagram being due precisely to that dissociation of centres which had at first been confounded. Experience, however, was far from justifying the theory at this point, since it nearly always showed, in partial and diverse combinations, several of those simple psychical 1 Bastian, On Different Kinds of Aphasia (Brit. Med. Journal, 1887). — Cf. the explanation (indicated merely as possible) of optical aphasia by Bernheim: De la cecite psychique des choses (Revue de Medecine, 1885).
2 Wysman, Aphasic und verwandte Zustdnde (Deutches Archiv. fur Klinische Medecin, 1880). — Magnan had already opened the way, as Skwortzoff's diagram indicates, De la cecite des mots (Th. de Med., 1881, pi. i).
8 Moeli, Ueber Aphasie bei Wahrnehmung der Gegenstdnde durch das Gesicht (Berliner Klinische Wochenschrift, 28 Apr., 1890).
4 Freud, Zur Auffassung der Aphasien. Leipzig, 1891.
158 MATTER AND MEMORY lesions which the theory isolated. The complica tion of the theories of aphasia being thus self- destructive, it is no wonder that modern patho logy, becoming more and more sceptical with regard to diagrams, is returning purely and simply to the description of facts.1 But how could it be otherwise? To hear some theorists discourse on sensory aphasia, we might imagine that they had never considered with any care the structure of a sentence. They argue as if a sentence were composed of nouns which call up the images of things. What becomes of those parts of speech, of which the precise function is to establish, between images, relations and shades of meaning of every kind? Is it said that each of such words still expresses and evokes a material image, more confused, no doubt, but yet deter mined? Consider then the host of different rela tions which can be expressed by the same word, according to the place it occupies and the terms which it unites. Is it urged that these are the refinements of a highly-developed language, but that speech is possible with concrete nouns that all summon up images of things? No doubt it is, but the more primitive the language you speak with me and the poorer in words which express relations, the more you are bound to allow for my mind's activity, since you compel me to find out the relations which you leave 1 Sommer, Addressing a Congress of Alienists. (Arch, de Neurologic, vol. xxiv, 1892).
CHAP, ii REALIZATION OF MEMORIES 159 unexpressed: which amounts to saying that you abandon more and more the hypothesis that each verbal image goes up and fetches down its corresponding idea. In truth, there is here only a question of degree: every language, whether elaborated or crude, leaves many more things to be understood than it is able to express. Essen tially discontinuous, since it proceeds by juxta posing words, speech can only indicate by a few guide-posts placed here and there the chief stages in the movement of thought. That is why I can indeed understand your speech if I start from a thought analogous to your own, and follow its windings by the aid of verbal images which are so many sign-posts that show me the way from time to time. But I shall never be able to understand it if I start from the verbal images themselves, because between two conse cutive verbal images there is a gulf which no amount of concrete representations can ever fill. For images can never be anything but things, and thought is a movement.
It is vain, therefore, to treat memory-images and ideas as ready-made things, and then assign Attempts to to them an abiding place in problemati- locaiize images caj centres. Nor is it of any avail to in the brain J Scted b°n~ disguise the hypothesis under the cover psychological of a language borrowed from anatomy analysis,. J and physiology; it is nothing but the association theory of mind; it has nothing in its favour but the constant tendency of discursive l6o MATTER AND MEMORY CHAP, n intellect to cut up all progress into phases and afterwards to solidify these phases into things; and since it is born a priori from a kind of metaphysical prepossession, it has neither the advantage of following the movement of con sciousness nor that of simplifying the explana tion of the facts.
But we must follow this illusion up to the point where it issues in a manifest contradiction. We have said that ideas, — pure recollections And moreover \ contradict summoned from the depths of memory, — themselves.
develop into memory-images more and more capable of inserting themselves into the motor diagram. In the degree that these recol lections take the form of a more complete, more concrete and more conscious represen tation, do they tend to confound themselves with the perception which attracts them or of which they adopt the outline. Therefore there is not, there cannot be in the brain a region in which memories congeal and accumulate. The alleged destruction of memories by an injury to the brain is but a break in the continuous pro gress by which they actualize themselves. And, consequently, if we insist on localizing the auditory memory of words, for instance, in a given part of the brain, we shall be led by equally cogent reasons to distinguish this image-centre from the percep tive centre or to confound the two in one. Now this is just what experience teaches.
For notice the strange contradiction to which CHAP, it REALIZATION OF MEMORIES l6l this theory is led by psychological analysis on the one hand, by pathological facts on the other. On the one hand, it would seem that if percep tion, once it has taken place, remains in the brain in the state of a stored-up memory, this can only be as an acquired disposition of the very elements that perception has affected: how, at what precise moment, can it go in search of others? This is, indeed, the most natural hypo thesis, and Bain 1 and Ribot 2 are content to rest upon it. But, on the other hand, there is pathology, which tells us that all the recollections of a certain kind may have gone while the corresponding faculty of perception remains unimpaired. Psychic blindness does not hinder seeing, any more than psychic deafness hinders hearing. More particularly, in regard to the loss of the auditory memory of words — the only one we are now considering — there are a number of facts which show it to be regularly associated with a destructive lesion of the first and second left temporo-sphenoidal convolutions,3 though not a single case is on record in which this lesion was the cause of deafness properly so-called: 1 The Senses and the Intellect, p. 329. Cf. Spencer, Principles of Psychology, vol. i., p. 456.
2 Ribot, Les maladies de la memoire. Paris, 1881, p. 10.
8 See an enumeration of the most typical cases in Shaw's article, The Sensory Side of Aphasia (Brain, 1893, p. 501). — Several authors, however, limit to the first convolution the lesion corresponding to the loss of verbal auditory images. See, in particular, Ballet, Le langage interieur, p. 153.
l62 MATTER AND MEMORY CHAP, n it has even been produced experimentally in the monkey without determining anything but psychic deafness, that is to say, a loss of the power to interpret the sounds which it was still able to hear.1 So that we must attribute to perception and to memory separate nervous elements. But then this hypothesis will be contradicted by the most elementary psychological observation; for we see that a memory, as it becomes more dis tinct and more intense, tends to become a percep tion, though there is no precise moment at which a radical transformation takes place, nor conse quently a moment when we can say that it moves forward from imaginative elements to sensory ele ments. Thus these two contrary hypotheses, the first identifying the elements of perception with the elements of memory, the second distinguish ing them, are of such a nature that each sends us back to the other without allowing us to rest in either.
How should it be otherwise? Here again distinct perception and memory-image are taken The memory- in the static condition, as things of image passes,,...,.,,,, by a dynamic which the first is supposed to be al- theKpercept1on ready complete without the second; Smes1Cactuai. whereas we ought to consider the dyna mic progress by which the one passes into the other.
For, on the one hand, complete perception is 1 Luciani, quoted by J. Soury, Les fonctions du cerveau, Paris, 1892, p. 211.
CHAP, n REALIZATION OF MEMORIES 163 only defined and distinguished by its coalescence with a memory-image, which we send forth to meet it. Only thus is attention secured, and without attention there is but a passive juxtapositing of sensations, accompanied by a mechanical reaction. But, on the other hand, as we shall show later, the memory-image itself, if it remained pure memory, would be ineffectual. Virtual, this memory can only become actual by means of the perception which attracts it. Powerless, it borrows life and strength from the present sensation in which it is materialized. Does not this amount to saying that distinct perception is brought about by two opposite currents, of which the one, centripetal, comes from the external object, and the other, centrifugal, has for its point of departure that which we term ' pure memory '? The first current, alone, would only give a passive percep tion with the mechanical reactions which accom pany it. The second, left to itself, tends to give a recollection that is actualized — more and more actual as the current becomes more marked. Together, these two currents make up, at their point of confluence, the perception that is distinct and recognized.
This is the witness of introspection. But we have no right to stop there. Undoubtedly there is considerable risk in venturing, without sufficient evidence, into the obscure problems of cerebral localization. But we have said that to separate from one another the completed per- 164 MATTER AND MEMORY CHAP, n ception and the memory image is to bring clini cal observation into conflict with psychological analysis, and that the result is a serious antino my in the theory of the localization of memories. We are bound to consider what becomes of the known facts when we cease to regard the brain as a storehouse of memories.1 Let us admit, for the moment, in order to simpli- 1 The theory which is here sketched out resembles, in one respect, that of Wundt. We will give the common element and the essential difference between them. With Wundt, we believe that distinct perception implies a centri fugal action; and thereby we are led to suppose with him (although in a slightly different sense), that the so-called image centres are rather centres for the grouping of sense-impressions. But whereas, according to Wundt, the centrifugal action lies in an ' apperceptive stimulation,' the nature of which can only be defined in a general manner, and which appears to correspond to what is commonly called the fixing of the attention, we maintain that this centrifugal action bears in each case a distinct form, the very form of that ' virtual object ' which tends to actualize itself by successive stages. Hence an important difference in our understanding of the office of the centres. Wundt is led to assume: ist, a general organ of apperception, occupying the frontal lobe; 2ndly, particular centres which, though most likely incapable of storing images, retain nevertheless a tendency or a disposition to reproduce them. Our con tention, on the contrary, is that no trace of an image can remain in the substance of the brain, and that no such centre of apperception can exist; but that there are merely, in that substance, organs of virtual perception, influenced by the intention of the memory, as there are at the periphery organs of real perception, influenced by the action of the object. (See Grundziige der physiologische Psychologic, vol. i, pp. 320-327.)
CHAP, ii REALIZATION OF MEMORIES 165 fy the argument, that stimuli from without give u any image- birth, either in the cortex or in other centre really,,, exists, it is cerebral centres, to elementary sensa- kind oj key- tions. In fact, every perception includes board, played.,,,, e,..
upon by mem- a considerable number of such sensations, ories, as the,,...,,. -,.
sense-organ is all co-existing and arranged in a deter- by obje3s!n mined order. Whence comes this order, and what ensures this co-existence? In the case of a present material object, there is no doubt as to the answer: order and co-existence come from an organ of sense, receiving the impression of an external object. This organ is constructed pre cisely with a view to allowing a plurality of simul taneous excitants to impress it in a certain order and in a certain way, by distributing themselves, all at one time, over selected portions of its sur face. It is like an immense keyboard, on which the external object executes at once its harmony of a thousand notes, thus calling forth in a definite order, and at a single moment, a great multitude of elementary sensations corresponding to all the points of the sensory centre that are concerned. Now, suppress the external object or the organ of sense, or both: the same elementary sensations may be excited, for the same strings are there, ready to vibrate in the same way; but where is the keyboard which permits thousands of them to be struck at once, and so many single notes to unite in one accord? In our opinion the ' region of images,' if it exists, can only be a keyboard of this nature. Certainly it is in no way inconl66 MATTER AND MEMORY CHAP, it ceivable that a purely psychical cause should directly set in action all the strings concerned. But in the case of mental hearing — which alone we are considering now — the localization of the function appears certain, since a definite injury of the temporal lobe abolishes it; and, on the other hand, we have set forth the reasons which make it impossible for us to admit, or even to conceive, traces of images deposited in any region of the cerebral substance. Hence only one plausible hy pothesis remains, namely, that this region occupies with regard to the centre of hearing itself the place that is exactly symmetrical with the organ of sense. It is, in this case, a mental ear.
But then the contradiction we have spoken of disappears. We see, on the one hand, that the auditory image called back by memory must set in motion the same nervous elements as the first perception, and that recollection must thus change gradually into perception. And we see also, on the other hand, that the faculty of recalling to memory complex sounds, such as words, may concern other parts of the nervous sub stance than does the faculty of perceiving them. This is why in psychic deafness real hearing survives mental hearing. The strings are still there, and to the influence of external sounds they vibrate still; it is the internal keyboard which is lacking.
In other terms, the centres in which the ele mentary sensations seem to originate may be actu- CHAP, ii REALIZATION OF MEMORIES 167