PROBLEMS OF GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY 649 



to use Hartley's phrase, i. e., more or less mechanical. But here as 

 little as elsewhere can the mechanical account for itself; these 

 psychical " quasi-mechanisms " have to be made, and the process of 

 making them is the essential part of psychical life. Presentations 

 do not associate themselves in virtue of some inherent adhesiveness 

 or attraction: it is not enough that they "occur together," as Bain 

 and the rest of his school imply. They must be attended to together: 

 it is only what subjective interest has integrated that is afterwards 

 automatically redintegrated. Were association a purely passive 

 process so far as the experient is concerned, it would be difficult to 

 account for the diversities which exist in the organized experiences 

 of creatures with the same general environment; but subjective 

 selection explains this at once. 



But the plasticity of the objective continuum, upon which this 

 process of organizing experience depends, opens up a whole group 

 of problems, which I may perhaps be permitted briefly to mention, 

 though they may seem to belong to psycho-physics rather than to 

 general psychology. How are we to conceive this plasticity? J. C. 

 Scaliger is reported to have said that two things especially excited 

 his curiosity, the cause of gravity and the cause of memory, meaning 

 thereby, I take it, pretty much what we are here calling plasticity. 

 Had Scaliger known what we now know about heredity, his curios- 

 ity would have been still more keenly excited. The facts of heredity 

 have led biologists again and again to more or less hazy but 

 withal interesting speculations concerning "organic memory," as 

 Hering has called it; "organic memoranda" would perhaps be a bet- 

 ter name. Memoranda, however, imply both the past and the future 

 presence of mind, of experiencing subject, though they may exist as 

 materialized records independently of past writer or future reader. 

 Heredity treated on these lines commits us to a more or less poetical 

 personification of nature; it is nature, the biologist supposes, which 

 makes, and equally it is nature, he supposes, which uses these 

 organic memoranda. The continuity of life as the biologist is wont 

 to regard it renders such a view possible. Omne vivum e vivo is 

 the formula of this continuity. But of any corresponding psychical 

 continuity we not only know nothing, but what else we do know 

 leads us to regard it as inconceivable. We have, then, continuity 

 of life between parental and filial organisms, and yet complete dis- 

 continuity between parental and filial experiences. But is there 

 after all complete discontinuity even between the two experiences? 

 Yes, we incline to answer, the more we consider feeling, attention, 

 initiative, the individualizing aspect of experience, or the higher 

 and later phases of it in which these are most pronounced. No, we 

 are tempted to answer, the more we consider the instinctive and 

 inherited aptitudes which constitute most of what is objective in 



