MEMORY AND ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. Ill 



may have been this very need of inducing organisms to avoid 

 the deleterious, and to seek the beneficial ; the raison cTetre 

 of Consciousness may have been that of supplying the con- 

 dition to the feeling of Pleasure and Pain. Be this as it may, 

 however, it seems certain, as a matter of observable fact, that 

 the association of Pleasure and Pain with organic states and 

 processes which are respectively beneficial and deleterious to 

 the organism, is the most important function of Conscious- 

 ness in the scheme of Evolution. And for this reason I have 

 placed the origin of Pleasures and Pains very low down in 

 the scale of conscious life. Indeed, if we contemplate the 

 subject, we shall find it difficult or impossible to imagine a 

 form of consciousness, however dim, which does not present, 

 in a correspondingly undeveloped condition, the capacity of 

 preferring some of its states to others — that is, of feeling a 

 distinction between quiescence and vague discomfort, which, 

 with a larger accession of the mind-element, grows into the 

 vivid contrast between a Pleasure and a Pain. I think, 

 therefore, it is needless to say more in justification of the 

 level on the diagram at which I have written these words. 



Memory and Association of Ideas. 



It is obvious that Memory must be, and is, a faculty which 

 appears very early in the development of Mind. A priori, 

 this must be so, because consciousness without memory would 

 be useless to the animal possessing it, and a posteriori we 

 find that this is so whether we contemplate the scale of 

 mental evolution in the animal kingdom or in the growing 

 child. I have therefore assigned the rise of Memory to the 

 level immediately succeeding that which is occupied by the 

 rise of Pleasures and Pains. 



In a previous chapter* I have endeavoured to show that, 

 even before the dawn of Consciousness, nervous actions of 

 adjustment when frequently repeated present conclusive 

 evidence that the nervous machinery concerned in them 

 becomes more or less organically adapted to perform them, 

 and so exhibits the objective aspect of memory. This objec- 

 tive aspect I spoke of as the memory of a ganglion. Since 

 that chapter was A^Titten, M. Ptibot has published his excel- 



* On " tlie Physical Basis of Mind." 



