Most psychologists have given a perfectly clear analysis of the phenomenon we describe. Christian Wolff, for example, writes:
"Suppose you have seen Mevius in the temple, but now afresh in Titus' house. I say you recognize Mevius, that is, are conscious of having seen him before because, although now you perceive him with your senses along with Titus' house, your imagination produces an image of him along with one of the temple, and of the acts of your own mind reflecting on Mevius in the temple. Hence the idea of Mevius which is reproduced in sense is contained in another series of perceptions than that which formerly contained it, and this difference is the reason why we are conscious of having had it before.... For whilst now you see Mevius in the house of Titus, your imagination places him in the temple, and renders you conscious of the state of mind which you found in yourself when you beheld him there. By this you know that you have seen him before, that is, you recognize him. But you recognize him because his idea is now contained in another series of perceptions from that in which you first saw him."[577]
Similarly James Mill writes:
"In my remembrance of George III., addressing the two houses of parliament, there is, first of all, the mere idea, or simple apprehension, the conception, as it is sometimes called, of the objects. There is combined with this, to make it memory, my idea of my having seen and heard those objects. And this combination is so close that it is not in my power to separate them. I cannot have the idea of George III.: his person and attitude, the paper he held in his hand, the sound of his voice while reading from it; without having the other idea along with it, that of my having been a witness of the scene.... If this explanation of the case in which we remember sensations is understood, the explanation of the case in which we remember ideas cannot occasion much of difficulty. I have a lively recollection of Polyphemus's cave, and the actions of Ulysses and the Cyclops, as described by Homer. In this recollection there is, first of all, the ideas, or simple conceptions of the objects and acts; and along with these ideas, and so closely combined as not to be separable, the idea of my having formerly had those same ideas. And this idea of my having formerly had those ideas is a very complicated idea; including the idea of myself of the present moment remembering, and that of myself of the past moment conceiving; and the whole series of the states of consciousness, which intervened between myself remembering, and myself conceiving."[578]
Memory is then the feeling of belief in a peculiar complex object; but all the elements of this object may be known to other states of belief; nor is there in the particular combination of them as they appear in memory anything so peculiar as to lead us to oppose the latter to other sorts of thought as something altogether sui generis, needing a special faculty to account for it. When later we come to our chapter on Belief we shall see that any represented object which is connected either mediately or immediately with our present sensations or emotional activities tends to be believed in as a reality. The sense of a peculiar active relation in it to ourselves is what gives to an object the characteristic quality of reality, and a merely imagined past event differs from a recollected one only in the absence of this peculiar-feeling relation. The electric current, so to speak, between it and our present self does not close. But in their other determinations the re-recollected past and the imaginary past may be much the same. In other words, there is nothing unique in the object of memory, and no special faculty is needed to account for its formation. It is a synthesis of parts thought of as related together, perception, imagination, comparison and reasoning being analogous syntheses of parts into complex objects. The objects of any of these faculties may awaken belief or fail to awaken it; the object of memory is only an object imagined in the past (usually very completely imagined there) to which the emotion of belief adheres.
MEMORY'S CAUSES.
Such being the phenomenon of memory, or the analysis of its object, can we see how it comes to pass? can we lay bare its causes?
Its complete exercise presupposes two things:
1) The retention of the remembered fact;