Sex & Character / Authorised Translation from the Sixth German Edition

by Otto Weininger

The title that I have given to this chapter at once opens the way to misinterpretation. It might appear as if the author supported the view that logical and ethical values were the objects exclusively of empirical psychology, psychical phenomena, like perception and sensation, and that logic and ethics, therefore, were subsections of psychology and based upon psychology.

I declare at once that I call this view, the so-called psychologismus, at once false and injurious. It is false because it can lead to nothing; and injurious because, while it hardly touches logic and ethics, it overthrows psychology itself. The exclusion of logic and ethics from the foundations of psychology, and the insertion of them in an appendix, is one of the results of the overgrowth of the doctrine of empirical perception, of that strange heap of dead, fleshless bones which is known as empirical psychology, and from which all real experience has been excluded. I have nothing to do with the empirical school, and in this matter lean towards the transcendentalism of Kant.

As the object of my work, however, is to discover the differences between different members of humanity, and not to discuss categories that would hold good for the angels in heaven, I shall not follow Kant closely, but remain more directly in psychological paths.

The justification of the title of this chapter must be reached along other lines. The tedious, because entirely new, demonstration of the earlier part of my work has shown that the human memory stands in intimate relation with things hitherto supposed unconnected with it—such things as time, value, genius, immortality. I have attempted to show that memory stands in intimate connection with all these. There must be some strong reason for the complete absence of earlier allusions to this side of the subject. I believe the reason to be no more than the inadequacy and slovenliness which hitherto have spoiled theories of memory.

I must here call attention to a theory first propounded by Charles Bonnet in the middle of the eighteenth century and towards the end of the nineteenth century, specially insisted upon by Ewald Hering and E. Mach. This theory regarded the human memory as being only a special case of a property common to all organised matter, the property that makes the path of new stimuli rather easier if these resemble stimuli that have acted at some former time. The theory really makes the human memory an adaptation in the sense of Lamarck, the result on the living organism of repeated stimulation. It is true that there is a point in common between the human memory and the increase of sensitiveness caused by the repeated application of a stimulus; that identical element consists in the permanence of the effect of the first stimulation. There is, however, a fundamental difference between the growth of a muscle that is much used or the adaptation of the eater of arsenic or morphia to increased doses, and the recollection of past experiences by human beings. In the one case the trace of the old is just to be felt in the new stimulation; in the other case, by means of the consciousness, the old situations are actually reproduced with all their individuation. The identification of the two is so superficial that it is a waste of time to dwell longer on it.

The doctrine of association as the theory of memory is linked with the foregoing physiological theory as a matter of history, through Hartley, and, as a matter of fact, because the idea of habit is shared by the two. The association theory attributes memory to the mechanical play of the linking of presentations according to four laws. It overlooks the fact that memory (the continuous memory of man) is a function of the will. I can remember a thing if I really will. In the case of hypnosis, when the recollection of all that has been forgotten is induced, an outside will replaces the will of the subject. It is will that sets in action the chains of association, and we have to deal here with something deeper than a mechanical principle.

In the association psychology, which first splits up the psychic life, and then vainly imagines that it can weld the re-assorted pieces together again, there is another confusion, the confusion between memory and recollection, which has persisted in spite of the well-founded objections of Avenarius and von Höffding. The recognition of a circumstance does not necessarily involve the special reproduction of the former impression, even although there seems to be a tendency for the new impression, at least, partly to recall the old one. But there is another kind of recognition, perhaps as common, in which the new impression does not appear to be directly linked with an association, but in which it comes, so to speak, “coloured” (James would say “tinged”) with that character that would be called by von Höffding the “familiarity quality.” To him who returns to his native place the roads and streets seem familiar, even although he has forgotten the names, has to ask his way, and can think of no special occasion on which he went along them. A melody may seem “familiar” and yet I may be unable to say where I heard it. The “character” (in the sense of Avenarius) of familiarity, of intimacy, hovers over the sense-impression itself, and analysis can detect no associations, none of the fusing of the old and new, which, according to the assertion of a presumptuous pseudo-psychology, produces the feeling; these cases are quite easy to distinguish from cases in which there is a real although vague association with an older experience in henid form.

In individual psychology this distinction is of great importance. In the highest types of mankind the consciousness of the continuous past is present in so active a form that the moment such a one sees an acquaintance in the street he is at once able to reproduce the last meeting as a complete experience, whereas in the case of the less gifted person, the feeling of familiarity that makes recognition possible, occurs when he is able to recall the past connection in all its details.

If we now, in conclusion, ask whether or no other animals than man possess a similar faculty for remembering and reviving their earlier lives in their entirety it is most probable that the answer must be in the negative. Animals could not, as they do, remain for hours at a time, motionless and peaceful on one spot, if they were capable of thinking of the future or of remembering the past. Animals have the feeling of familiarity and the sense of expectation (as we find from the recognition of his master by a dog after twenty years’ absence); but they possess no memory and no hope. They are capable of recognition through the sense of familiarity, but they have no memory.

As memory has been shown to be a special character unconnected with the lower spheres of psychical life, and the exclusive property of human beings, it is not surprising that it is closely related to such higher things as the idea of value and of time, and the craving for immortality, which is absent in animals, and possible to men only in so far as they possess the quality of genius. If memory be an essentially human thing, part of the deepest being of humanity, finding expression in mankind’s most peculiar qualities, then it will not be surprising if memory be also related to the phenomena of logic and ethics. I have now to explore this relationship.