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sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first
appearance in the soul. By IDEAS I mean the faint images of these
in thinking and reasoning.”
He next explains the difference between simple and complex ideas,
and explains that a complex idea may occur without any similar
complex impression. But as regards simple ideas, he states that
“every simple idea has a simple impression, which resembles it,
and every simple impression a correspondent idea.” He goes on to
enunciate the general principle “that all our simple ideas in
their first appearance are derived from simple impressions, which
are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent”
(“Treatise of Human Nature,” Part I, Section I).
It is this fact, that images resemble antecedent sensations,
which enables us to call them images “of” this or that. For the
understanding of memory, and of knowledge generally, the
recognizable resemblance of images and sensations is of
fundamental importance.
There are difficulties in establishing Hume’s principles, and
doubts as to whether it is exactly true. Indeed, he himself
signalized an exception immediately after stating his maxim.
Nevertheless, it is impossible to doubt that in the main simple
images are copies of similar simple sensations which have
occurred earlier, and that the same is true of complex images in
all cases of memory as opposed to mere imagination. Our power of
acting with reference to what is sensibly absent is largely due
to this characteristic of images, although, as education
advances, images tend to be more and more replaced by words. We
shall have much to say in the next two lectures on the subject of
images as copies of sensations. What has been said now is merely
by way of reminder that this is their most notable
characteristic.
I am by no means confident that the distinction between images
and sensations is ultimately valid, and I should be glad to be
convinced that images can be reduced to sensations of a peculiar
kind. I think it is clear, however, that, at any rate in the case
of auditory and visual images, they do differ from ordinary
auditory and visual sensations, and therefore form a recognizable
class of occurrences, even if it should prove that they can be
regarded as a sub-class of sensations. This is all that is
necessary to validate the use of images to be made in the sequel.
LECTURE IX. MEMORY
Memory, which we are to consider to-day, introduces us to
knowledge in one of its forms. The analysis of knowledge will
occupy us until the end of the thirteenth lecture, and is the
most difficult part of our whole enterprise.
I do not myself believe that the analysis of knowledge can be
effected entirely by means of purely external observation, such
as behaviourists employ. I shall discuss this question in later
lectures. In the present lecture I shall attempt the analysis of
memory-knowledge, both as an introduction to the problem of
knowledge in general, and because memory, in some form, is
presupposed in almost all other knowledge. Sensation, we decided,
is not a form of knowledge. It might, however, have been expected
that we should begin our discussion of knowledge with PERCEPTION,
i.e. with that integral experience of things in the environment,
out of which sensation is extracted by psychological analysis.
What is called perception differs from sensation by the fact that
the sensational ingredients bring up habitual associates—images
and expectations of their usual correlates—all of which are
subjectively indistinguishable from the sensation. The FACT of
past experience is essential in producing this filling-out of
sensation, but not the RECOLLECTION of past experience. The
nonsensational elements in perception can be wholly explained as
the result of habit, produced by frequent correlations.
Perception, according to our definition in Lecture VII, is no
more a form of knowledge than sensation is, except in so far as
it involves expectations. The purely psychological problems which
it raises are not very difficult, though they have sometimes been
rendered artificially obscure by unwillingness to admit the
fallibility of the nonsensational elements of perception. On the
other hand, memory raises many difficult and very important
problems, which it is necessary to consider at the first possible
moment.
One reason for treating memory at this early stage is that it
seems to be involved in the fact that images are recognized as
“copies” of past sensible experience. In the preceding lecture I
alluded to Hume’s principle “that all our simple ideas in their
first appearance are derived from simple impressions, which are
correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent.” Whether
or not this principle is liable to exceptions, everyone would
agree that is has a broad measure of truth, though the word
“exactly” might seem an overstatement, and it might seem more
correct to say that ideas APPROXIMATELY represent impressions.
Such modifications of Hume’s principle, however, do not affect
the problem which I wish to present for your consideration,
namely: Why do we believe that images are, sometimes or always,
approximately or exactly, copies of sensations? What sort of
evidence is there? And what sort of evidence is logically
possible? The difficulty of this question arises through the fact
that the sensation which an image is supposed to copy is in the
past when the image exists, and can therefore only be known by
memory, while, on the other hand, memory of past sensations seems
only possible by means of present images. How, then, are we to
find any way of comparing the present image and the past
sensation? The problem is just as acute if we say that images
differ from their prototypes as if we say that they resemble
them; it is the very possibility of comparison that is hard to
understand.* We think we can know that they are alike or
different, but we cannot bring them together in one experience
and compare them. To deal with this problem, we must have a
theory of memory. In this way the whole status of images as
“copies” is bound up with the analysis of memory.
* How, for example, can we obtain such knowledge as the
following: “If we look at, say, a red nose and perceive it, and
after a little while ekphore, its memory-image, we note
immediately how unlike, in its likeness, this memory-image is to
the original perception” (A. Wohlgemuth, “On the Feelings and
their Neural Correlate with an Examination of the Nature of
Pain,” “Journal of Psychology,” vol. viii, part iv, June, 1917).
In investigating memory-beliefs, there are certain points which
must be borne in mind. In the first place, everything
constituting a memory-belief is happening now, not in that past
time to which the belief is said to refer. It is not logically
necessary to the existence of a memory-belief that the event
remembered should have occurred, or even that the past should
have existed at all. There is no logical impossibility in the
hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago,
exactly as it then was, with a population that “remembered” a
wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection
between events at different times; therefore nothing that is
happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the
hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago. Hence the
occurrences which are CALLED knowledge of the past are logically
independent of the past; they are wholly analysable into present
contents, which might, theoretically, be just what they are even
if no past had existed.
I am not suggesting that the non-existence of the past should be
entertained as a serious hypothesis. Like all sceptical
hypotheses, it is logically tenable, but uninteresting. All that
I am doing is to use its logical tenability as a help in the
analysis of what occurs when we remember.
In the second place, images without beliefs are insufficient to
constitute memory; and habits are still more insufficient. The
behaviourist, who attempts to make psychology a record of
behaviour, has to trust his memory in making the record. “Habit”
is a concept involving the occurrence of similar events at
different times; if the behaviourist feels confident that there
is such a phenomenon as habit, that can only be because he trusts
his memory, when it assures him that there have been other times.
And the same applies to images. If we are to know as it is
supposed we do—that images are “copies,” accurate or inaccurate,
of past events, something more than the mere occurrence of images
must go to constitute this knowledge. For their mere occurrence,
by itself, would not suggest any connection with anything that
had happened before.
Can we constitute memory out of images together with suitable
beliefs? We may take it that memory-images, when they occur in
true memory, are (a) known to be copies, (b) sometimes known to
be imperfect copies (cf. footnote on previous page). How is it
possible to know that a memory-image is an imperfect copy,
without having a more accurate copy by which to replace it? This
would SEEM to suggest that we have a way of knowing the past
which is independent of images, by means of which we can
criticize image-memories. But I do not think such an inference is
warranted.
What results, formally, from our knowledge of the past through
images of which we recognize the inaccuracy, is that such images
must have two characteristics by which we can arrange them in two
series, of which one corresponds to the more or less remote
period in the past to which they refer, and the other to our
greater or less confidence in their accuracy. We will take the
second of these points first.
Our confidence or lack of confidence in the accuracy of a
memory-image must, in fundamental cases, be based upon a
characteristic of the image itself, since we cannot evoke the
past bodily and compare it with the present image. It might be
suggested that vagueness is the required characteristic, but I do
not think this is the case. We sometimes have images that are by
no means peculiarly vague, which yet we do not trust—for
example, under the influence of fatigue we may see a friend’s
face vividly and clearly, but horribly distorted. In such a case
we distrust our image in spite of its being unusually clear. I
think the characteristic by which we distinguish the images we
trust is the feeling of FAMILIARITY that accompanies them. Some
images, like some sensations, feel very familiar, while others
feel strange. Familiarity is a feeling capable of degrees. In an
image of a well-known face, for example, some parts may feel more
familiar than others; when this happens, we have more belief in
the accuracy of the familiar parts than in that of the unfamiliar
parts. I think it is by this means that we become critical of
images, not by some imageless memory with which we compare them.
I shall return to the consideration of familiarity shortly.
I come now to the other characteristic which memory-images must
have in order to account for our knowledge of the past. They must
have some characteristic which makes us regard them as referring
to more or less remote portions of the past. That is to say if we
suppose that A is the event remembered, B the remembering, and t
the interval of time between A and B, there must be some
characteristic of B which is capable of degrees, and which, in
accurately dated memories, varies as t varies. It may increase as
t increases, or diminish as t increases. The question which of
these occurs is not of any importance for the theoretic
serviceability of the characteristic in question.
In actual fact, there are doubtless various factors that concur
in giving us the feeling of greater or less remoteness in
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