198 MATTER AND MEMORY CHAP, in 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 tex- tually, 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 mul- differ- 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 reflexion, 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, 206 MATTER AND MEMORY CHAP, m 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 dif- ferentiations; 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 is discovered and genera are constituted. But we relegate nothing to the unconscious, for the very simple reason that it is not, in our opinion, an effort of a psychological nature which here dis engages similarity; this similarity acts objectively like a force, and provokes reactions that are iden tical in virtue of the purely physical law which re quires that the same general effects should follow the same profound causes. Hydrochloric acid always acts in the same way upon carbonate of lime — whether in the form of marble or of chalk — yet we do not say that the acid perceives in the various species the characteristic features of the genus. Now there is no essential difference between the process by which this acid picks out from the salt its base, and the act of the plant which invariably extracts from the most diverse soils those elements that serve to nourish it. Make one more step; imagine a rudimentary con sciousness such as that of an amoeba in a drop of water: it will be sensible of the resemblance, and not of the difference, in the various organic substances which it can assimilate. In short, we can follow from the mineral to the plant, from the plant to the simplest conscious beings, from the animal to man, the progress of the operation by which things and beings seize from out their surroundings that which attracts them, that which interests them practically, without needing any effort of abstraction, simply because the rest of their surroundings takes no hold upon 208 MATTER AND MEMORY CHAP, in them: this similarity of reaction following actions superficially different is the germ which the human consciousness developes into general ideas.
Consider, indeed, the purpose and function of our nervous system as far as we can infer them from its structure. We see a great so that the variety of mechanisms of perception, K5)eli-dea a^ D0und, through the intermediary iTisedebP?e°-re of the centres, to the same motor sented. apparatus. Sensation is unstable; it can take the most varied shades; the motor mechanism, on the contrary, once set going, will invariably work in the same way. We may then suppose perceptions as different as possible in their superficial details: if only they are continued by the same motor reactions, if the organism can extract from them the same useful effects, if they impress upon the body the same attitude, some thing common will issue from them, and the general idea will have been felt and passively experienced, before being represented. — Here then we escape at last from the circle in which we at first appeared to be confined. In order to generalize, we said, we have to abstract similarity, but in order to disengage similarity usefully we must already know how to generalize. There really is no circle, because the similarity, from which the mind starts when it first begins the work of abstraction, is not the similarity at which the mind arrives when it consciously generalizes. That from which it starts is a similarity felt and lived; or, if you prefer CHAP. in. MEMORY AND GENERAL IDEAS the expression, a similarity which is automatically acted. That to which it returns is a similarity in telligently perceived, or thought. And it is precisely in the course of this progress that are built up, by the double effort of the understanding and of the memory, the perception of individuals and the conception of genera, — memory grafting dis tinctions upon resemblances which have been spontaneously abstracted, the understanding dis engaging from the habit of resemblances the clear idea of generality. This idea of generality was, in the beginning, only our consciousness of a likeness of attitude in a diversity of situations; it was habit itself, mounting from the sphere of move ment to that of thought. But from genera so sketched out mechanically by habit we have passed, by an effort of reflexion upon this very process, to the general idea of genus; and when that idea has been once constituted, we have con structed (this time voluntarily) an unlimited num ber of general notions. It is not necessary here to follow the intellect into the detail of this con struction. It is enough to say that the under standing, imitating the effort of nature, has also set up motor apparatuses, artificial in this case, to make a limited number of them answer to an un limited number of individual objects: the assem blage of these mechanisms is articulate speech.
Yet these two divergent operations of the mind, the one by which it discerns individuals, the other by which it constructs genera, are far from demand- 2IO MATTER AND MEMORY CHAP, in ing the same effort or progressing with the same rapidity. The first, requiring only the inter vention of memory, takes place from the outset of our experience; the second goes on indefinitely without ever reaching its goal. The first issues in the formation of stable images, which in their turn are stored up in memory; the second comes out in representations that are unstable and evanescent. We must dwell on this last point, for we touch here an essential problem of mental life.
The essence of the general idea, in fact, is to be unceasingly going backwards and forwards between the plane of action and that of pure memory. Let us refer once more to the dia gram we traced above. At S is the present perception which I have of my body, that is to say, of a certain sensori-motor equilibrium. Over the surface of the base AB are spread, we may say, my recollections in their totality. Within the cone so determined the general idea oscillates continually between the summit S and the base AB. In S it would take the clearly defined form of a bodily attitude or of an uttered word; at AB it would wear the aspect, no less defined, of the thousand individual images into which its fragile unity would break up. And that is why a psychology which movement"1 abides by the already done, which- con- pfanee<of siders only that which is made and tire ignores that which is in the making, will never perceive in this movement CHAP. Ill MEMORY AND GENERAL IDEAS 211 anything more than the two extremities between which it oscillates; it makes the general idea coincide sometimes with the action which mani fests it or the word which expresses it, and at other times with the multitudinous images, unlimited in number, which are its equivalent in memory. But the truth is that the general idea escapes us as soon as we try to fix it at either of the two extremities. It consists in the double current which goes from the one to the other, — always ready either to crystallize into uttered words or to evaporate into memories.
This amounts to saying that between the sensori-motor mechanisms figured by the point S and the totality of the memories disposed in AB there is room, as we indicated in the preceding chapter, for a thou sand repetitions of our psychical life, figured by as many sections A'B', A"B", etc., of the same cone. We tend to scatter ourselves over AB in the measure that we detach our selves from our sensory and motor state to live in the life of dreams: FIG. 5.
FIG. 5.
we tend to concentrate ourselves in S in the measure that we attach ourselves more firmly to the present reality, 212 MATTER AND MEMORY CHAP, m responding by motor reactions to sensory stimula tion. In point of fact, the normal self never stays in either of these extreme positions; it moves between them, adopts in turn the positions corre sponding to the intermediate sections, or, in other words, gives to its representations just enough image and just enough idea for them to be able to lend useful aid to the present action.
From this conception of the lower mental life the laws of the association of ideas can be deduced. But, before we deal with this point, we must first show the insufficiency of the current theories of association.
That every idea which arises in the mind has a relation of similarity or of contiguity with But associa- tne previous mental state, we do not ie dispute; but a statement of the kind throws no light on the mechanism of as- and eoJrea" sociation; nor, indeed, does it really tell actual needs. us any thing at all. For we should seek in vain for two ideas which have not some point of resemblance, or which do not touch each other somewhere. To take similarity first: however profound are the differences which separate two images, we shall always find, if we go back high enough, a common genus to which they belong, and consequently a resemblance which may serve as a connecting link between them. And, in regard to contiguity, a perception A, as we said before, will not evoke' by contiguity ' a former image B, unless CHAP, ni THE ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS 213