The Analysis of Mind by Bertrand Russell (red queen free ebook txt) 📕

remembered event. There may be a specific feeling which could be

called the feeling of “pastness,” especially where immediate

memory is concerned. But apart from this, there are other marks.

One of these is context. A recent memory has, usually, more

context than a more distant one. When a remembered event has a

remembered context, this may occur in two ways, either (a) by

successive images in the same order as their prototypes, or (b)

by remembering a whole process simultaneously, in the same way in

which a present process may be apprehended, through akoluthic

sensations which, by fading, acquire the mark of just-pastness in

an increasing degree as they fade, and are thus placed in a

series while all sensibly present. It will be context in this

second sense, more specially, that will give us a sense of the

nearness or remoteness of a remembered event.

There is, of course, a difference between knowing the temporal

relation of a remembered event to the present, and knowing the

time-order of two remembered events. Very often our knowledge of

the temporal relation of a remembered event to the present is

inferred from its temporal relations to other remembered events.

It would seem that only rather recent events can be placed at all

accurately by means of feelings giving their temporal relation to

the present, but it is clear that such feelings must play an

essential part in the process of dating remembered events.

We may say, then, that images are regarded by us as more or less

accurate copies of past occurrences because they come to us with

two sorts of feelings: (1) Those that may be called feelings of

familiarity; (2) those that may be collected together as feelings

giving a sense of pastness. The first lead us to trust our

memories, the second to assign places to them in the time-order.

We have now to analyse the memory-belief, as opposed to the

characteristics of images which lead us to base memory-beliefs

upon them.

If we had retained the “subject” or “act” in knowledge, the whole

problem of memory would have been comparatively simple. We could

then have said that remembering is a direct relation between the

present act or subject and the past occurrence remembered: the

act of remembering is present, though its object is past. But the

rejection of the subject renders some more complicated theory

necessary. Remembering has to be a present occurrence in some way

resembling, or related to, what is remembered. And it is

difficult to find any ground, except a pragmatic one, for

supposing that memory is not sheer delusion, if, as seems to be

the case, there is not, apart from memory, any way of

ascertaining that there really was a past occurrence having the

required relation to our present remembering. What, if we

followed Meinong’s terminology, we should call the “object” in

memory, i.e. the past event which we are said to be remembering,

is unpleasantly remote from the “content,” i.e. the present

mental occurrence in remembering. There is an awkward gulf

between the two, which raises difficulties for the theory of

knowledge. But we must not falsify observation to avoid

theoretical difficulties. For the present, therefore, let us

forget these problems, and try to discover what actually occurs

in memory.

Some points may be taken as fixed, and such as any theory of

memory must arrive at. In this case, as in most others, what may

be taken as certain in advance is rather vague. The study of any

topic is like the continued observation of an object which is

approaching us along a road: what is certain to begin with is the

quite vague knowledge that there is SOME object on the road. If

you attempt to be less vague, and to assert that the object is an

elephant, or a man, or a mad dog, you run a risk of error; but

the purpose of continued observation is to enable you to arrive

at such more precise knowledge. In like manner, in the study of

memory, the certainties with which you begin are very vague, and

the more precise propositions at which you try to arrive are less

certain than the hazy data from which you set out. Nevertheless,

in spite of the risk of error, precision is the goal at which we

must aim.

The first of our vague but indubitable data is that there is

knowledge of the past. We do not yet know with any precision what

we mean by “knowledge,” and we must admit that in any given

instance our memory may be at fault. Nevertheless, whatever a

sceptic might urge in theory, we cannot practically doubt that we

got up this morning, that we did various things yesterday, that a

great war has been taking place, and so on. How far our knowledge

of the past is due to memory, and how far to other sources, is of

course a matter to be investigated, but there can be no doubt

that memory forms an indispensable part of our knowledge of the

past.

The second datum is that we certainly have more capacity for

knowing the past than for knowing the future. We know some things

about the future, for example what eclipses there will be; but

this knowledge is a matter of elaborate calculation and

inference, whereas some of our knowledge of the past comes to us

without effort, in the same sort of immediate way in which we

acquire knowledge of occurrences in our present environment. We

might provisionally, though perhaps not quite correctly, define

“memory” as that way of knowing about the past which has no

analogue in our knowledge of the future; such a definition would

at least serve to mark the problem with which we are concerned,

though some expectations may deserve to rank with memory as

regards immediacy.

A third point, perhaps not quite so certain as our previous two,

is that the truth of memory cannot be wholly practical, as

pragmatists wish all truth to be. It seems clear that some of the

things I remember are trivial and without any visible importance

for the future, but that my memory is true (or false) in virtue

of a past event, not in virtue of any future consequences of my

belief. The definition of truth as the correspondence between

beliefs and facts seems peculiarly evident in the case of memory,

as against not only the pragmatist definition but also the

idealist definition by means of coherence. These considerations,

however, are taking us away from psychology, to which we must now

return.

It is important not to confuse the two forms of memory which

Bergson distinguishes in the second chapter of his “Matter and

Memory,” namely the sort that consists of habit, and the sort

that consists of independent recollection. He gives the instance

of learning a lesson by heart: when I know it by heart I am said

to “remember” it, but this merely means that I have acquired

certain habits; on the other hand, my recollection of (say) the

second time I read the lesson while I was learning it is the

recollection of a unique event, which occurred only once. The

recollection of a unique event cannot, so Bergson contends, be

wholly constituted by habit, and is in fact something radically

different from the memory which is habit. The recollection alone

is true memory. This distinction is vital to the understanding of

memory. But it is not so easy to carry out in practice as it is

to draw in theory. Habit is a very intrusive feature of our

mental life, and is often present where at first sight it seems

not to be. There is, for example, a habit of remembering a unique

event. When we have once described the event, the words we have

used easily become habitual. We may even have used words to

describe it to ourselves while it was happening; in that case,

the habit of these words may fulfil the function of Bergson’s

true memory, while in reality it is nothing but habit-memory. A

gramophone, by the help of suitable records, might relate to us

the incidents of its past; and people are not so different from

gramophones as they like to believe.

In spite, however, of a difficulty in distinguishing the two

forms of memory in practice, there can be no doubt that both

forms exist. I can set to work now to remember things I never

remembered before, such as what I had to eat for breakfast this

morning, and it can hardly be wholly habit that enables me to do

this. It is this sort of occurrence that constitutes the essence

of memory Until we have analysed what happens in such a case as

this, we have not succeeded in understanding memory.

The sort of memory with which we are here concerned is the sort

which is a form of knowledge. Whether knowledge itself is

reducible to habit is a question to which I shall return in a

later lecture; for the present I am only anxious to point out

that, whatever the true analysis of knowledge may be, knowledge

of past occurrences is not proved by behaviour which is due to

past experience. The fact that a man can recite a poem does not

show that he remembers any previous occasion on which he has

recited or read it. Similarly, the performances of animals in

getting out of cages or mazes to which they are accustomed do not

prove that they remember having been in the same situation

before. Arguments in favour of (for example) memory in plants are

only arguments in favour of habit-memory, not of knowledge-memory. Samuel Butler’s arguments in favour of the view that an

animal remembers something of the lives of its ancestors* are,

when examined, only arguments in favour of habit-memory. Semon’s

two books, mentioned in an earlier lecture, do not touch

knowledge-memory at all closely. They give laws according to

which images of past occurrences come into our minds, but do not

discuss our belief that these images refer to past occurrences,

which is what constitutes knowledge-memory. It is this that is of

interest to theory of knowledge. I shall speak of it as “true”

memory, to distinguish it from mere habit acquired through past

experience. Before considering true memory, it will be well to

consider two things which are on the way towards memory, namely

the feeling of familiarity and recognition.

* See his “Life and Habit and Unconscious Memory.”

We often feel that something in our sensible environment is

familiar, without having any definite recollection of previous

occasions on which we have seen it. We have this feeling normally

in places where we have often been before—at home, or in

well-known streets. Most people and animals find it essential to

their happiness to spend a good deal of their time in familiar

surroundings, which are especially comforting when any danger

threatens. The feeling of familiarity has all sorts of degrees,

down to the stage where we dimly feel that we have seen a person

before. It is by no means always reliable; almost everybody has

at some time experienced the well-known illusion that all that is

happening now happened before at some time. There are occasions

when familiarity does not attach itself to any definite object,

when there is merely a vague feeling that SOMETHING is familiar.

This is illustrated by Turgenev’s “Smoke,” where the hero is long

puzzled by a haunting sense that something in his present is

recalling something in his past, and at last traces it to the

smell of heliotrope. Whenever the sense of familiarity occurs

without a definite object, it leads us to search the environment

until we are satisfied that we have found the appropriate object,

which leads us to the judgment: “THIS is familiar.” I think