ON THE REALITY OF THE SELF. 205 
The problem and mystery of memory is that that mental 
state which we recall is both present and absent at one and 
the same moment. It is present because we remember it 
and because it enters into our immediate consciousness ; yet 
itis absent, because it is some past state which we experienced 
yesterday or a week ago. How can we say that some after 
image resembles some original impression when that impres- 
sion ttself has gone and can never be recovered? By what 
proximity of nerve tracts can we expiain this wonderful 
power? For its essence seems to lie in the capacity to annul 
the conditions of time. The past is not the past for us, when 
we remember, but the present. On the other hand, all those 
intimations which we derive through our senses are subject 
to the conditions of time; they have their before and after, 
and their natural sequences. Yet the active memory defies 
the conditions ofits own data. It defies time itself, and seems 
to be above it. How can such a phenomenon be explained ? 
Is not the obvious explanation also the necessary one, that 
the mind has laws of its own apart from those laws which 
enter into that physical organism of which it makes so much 
use ? 
3. I will refer to only one more fact’ of our mental life, 
which is the largest and most comprehensive of all. We 
know now many of the conditions on which consciousness 
seems to depend, albeit that consciousness itself being the 
condition of all our internal experience is necessarily incapable 
of any definition. We can speak of the organ of conscious- 
ness, just as we can point out its physical pre-requisites. 
Consciousness is clearly dependent on the character and 
amount of blood supply ; for to stop the supply is to put an 
end to consciousness, and to corrupt it is to depress and 
disturb consciousness. Moreover the character of the circula- 
tion of the bluod seems to affect profoundly the phenomena 
of consciousness, quickened circulation meaning more acute 
perception, and slower circulation involving tardier mental 
processes. We have learnt, too, to fix on the brain, in the 
vase of man, as pre- -eminently the organ of consciousness ; 
only meaning, however, by such an assertion that the activity 
of the nervous matter within the cerebrum is intimately 
connected . with all mental phenomena and that outside 
things can only affect consciousness, if they get themselves as 
it were imprinted upon or represented by cerebral processes. 
But if from cousciousness, in the general sense of the term, we 
pass to self-consciousness, the problem is altered. For the 
marvellous thing about self-consciousness is that m it the 
