392 ZOOLOGICAL PHILOSOPHY 



This I propose to prove ; but first let us consider the importance of the 

 faculty in question. 



Memory may be described as the most important and necessary of 

 the intellectual faculties, for without memory what could we do ? 

 how could we provide for our various needs, if we could not recall 

 the different objects, that we have come to know or to use for their 

 satisfaction ? 



Without memory, man would have no kind of knowledge ; he would 

 be absolutely destitute of science ; he could cultivate no art ; he could 

 not even have a language for the expression of his ideas ; and seeing 

 that, in order to think or even to imagine, he must, in the first place, 

 have ideas and, in the second place, institute comparisons between 

 these ideas, he would be altogether deprived of the faculty of thought 

 and imagination if he had no memory. When the ancients said that 

 the muses were daughters of memory, they proved that they were 

 conscious of the importance of this intellectual faculty. 



We saw in the preceding chapter that ideas spring from sensations 

 which we have experienced and noticed, and that with the ideas thus 

 impressed upon our organ we can form others which are indirect and 

 complex. Since the time of Locke, it has been recognised that all 

 ideas whatever originate from sensations and that none have any 

 other origin. 



We shall now see that memory can only come into existence after 

 ideas have been acquired, and consequently that no individual could 

 display any act of memory unless he had ideas impressed on the 

 organ which is the seat of it. 



If this is so, nature can have given to the most perfect animals and 

 even to man nothing but memory ; she cannot give prescience, that is 

 to say, a knowledge of future events.^ 



Man would no doubt be very unhappy, if he knew definitely what 

 was going to happen to him, the precise date of the end of his hfe, etc., 

 but the real reason why he has not this knowledge is that nature could 

 not give it to him ; it was impossible for her. Seeing that memory is 

 only the recollection of past events, of which we were able to form 

 ideas, and seeing that the future will give rise to events which do not 

 yet exist, we cannot form any idea of it, except in the case of such facts 

 as belong to certain ascertained parts of the order followed by nature. 



^ With regard to future events, those which flow from comparatively simple causes 

 and from the laws which man has discovered in his studies of nature, are capable of 

 being foreseen by him, and up to a certain point of being referred in advance to more 

 or less definite dates. Thus astronomers can prophesy the future date of an eclipse, 

 or when some star will be in some particular position ; but this foreknowledge of 

 certain facts is confined to a very small number of objects. Yet many other future 

 events of a difiFerent kind are also known to him : for he knows that they will occur 

 without being able to specify precisely when. 



