Address to the British Association 209 



the illustrious French naturalist. Buffon was far from ignor- 

 ing, indeed he distinctly enumerates, the various obtrusive 

 phenomena which often lead the vulgar to attribute, without 

 qualification, both knowledge and memory to brutes. But, 

 in fact, he distinguishes between memory and memory.^ 

 His words are : ' Si Ton a donne quelque attention a ce que 

 je viens de dire, on aura deja senti que je distingue deux 

 especes de memoire infiniment differentes I'une de I'autre 

 par leur cause, et qui peuvent cependant se ressembler 

 en quelque sorte par leurs effets ; la premiere est la trace de 

 nos idees, et la seconde, que j'appellerais volon tiers reminis- 

 cence 2 plutot que memoire, n'est que le renouvellement de 

 nos sensations,' and he declares ^ true memory to consist in 

 the recurrence of ideas as distinguished from revived sen- 

 suous imaginations. 



This distinction is one which it is easy to perceive. That we 

 have an automatic memory, such as animals have, is obvious ; 

 but the presence of intellectual memory (or memory proper) 

 may be made evident by the act of searching our minds (so 

 to speak) for something which we know we have fully 

 remembered before, and thus intellectually remember to 

 have known, though we cannot now bring it before our 

 imagination. 



As with memory, so with other of our mental powers, Ave 

 may, I think, distinguish between a higher and a lower 

 faculty of each ; between our higher, self-conscious, reflective, 

 mental acts — the acts of our intellectual faculty — and those 

 of our merely sensitive power. This distinction (to which I 

 have elsewhere * called attention) I believe to be one of the 

 most fundamental of all the distinctions of biology, and to be 



^ Ojp. cit. , tome iv. p. 60. 



2 Here he follows, without citing, the old distinction of Aristotle between 

 memory and reminiscence. 

 ^ Op. city tome iv. p. 56. 

 * Lessons from Nature : Murray, 1876, p. 196. 



VOL. II. O 



