ON THE REALITY OF THE SELF. 203 
in the brain, but this does not explain its activity. 
And if the answer of the physiologist be that there are 
certain associations set up between particular nerve-currents, 
and that when these run together they rouse all sorts of 
subsidiary commotions—just as in a telephone wire one 
might hear not only the voice of the speaker but the church 
bells of the spire near which it passes— then it must be 
said that nerve-associations however “dynamical” they may 
be declared to be, are yet not trams of thought. How 
absurd, m pomt of fact, 1s much of this quasi-scientific 
language when applied to the mind! We might, perhaps, 
understand how material nervous tracts are “ associated” or 
“agolutinated,” or subject to an “organic nexus:” but 
what on earth is the meaning of the “organic nexus” which 
binds one phase of consciousness to another? Is thought 
something which can be tied on to another thought so that 
the two can now hang together? Or is it not rather a 
complex idea, a unity of fused or transformed elements, 
which can only be due to the activity of a real and 
independent and immaterial mind ? 
2. We pass to another mental faculty, with which long 
habit has made us familiar, but the exact operation of which 
is hardly short of a mystery—I mean the faculty of memory. 
It is memory, of course, which renders possible any 
accumulation of knowledge. It is equally memory which 
renders possible any large exercise of constructive and 
imaginative skill. In its two forms it lies at the foundation 
of what we understand by consciousness, its passive form 
being that which is called retentive or organic memory, and 
its active form, reproductive. It is by means of memory 
that those laws of mental association become possible which 
have been made of such use in explaining the train of our 
ideas and our processes of thought. Association works 
either through similarity of impressions or contiguity, whether 
in time or space. That isto say, we either associate together 
ideas or impressions which resemble one another, or which 
have come into our consciousness near each other, in 
neighbouring parts of space or successive moments of time. 
But only on the presupposition of memory can either form of 
association be realized, 
Now can there be any physical explanation of memory? 
At first sight the answer seems certainly, yes. We are able 
to revive past impressions because of the existence of those 
nervous tracts or channels through which the ordinary impres- 
sions reached us. That there is a physical basis for memory 
