J.— PSYCHOLOGY. 167 
This leads on to the broader question. Does that which we call the 
unconscious depend on the presence of images and ideas; or are images 
and ideas the cognitive raiment which the unconscious puts on at the 
emergent levels of perceptive and reflective consciousness? The 
question in brief really comes to this: Are there what we may compre- 
hensively speak of as memories in the unconscious? In much present- 
day resuscitation of Herbartian notions (which some of us thought were 
little better than picturesque mythology long ago discarded as obsolete) 
the unconscious is peopled with such memories—with images, ideas, 
wishes, and thoughts, living together, as Professor James Ward puts it, 
“like shades on the banks of the Styx.’ Is this so? It is against this 
sort of thing that the behaviourist rises in vigorous protest; and, swing- 
ing his pendulum too far (in some cases), drops psychology overboard 
and proceeds on his course in the biological ship. For those who cannot 
go to this extreme the alternative view is that memories have being 
only in supraliminal consciousness and that the unconscious, as such, 
is no wise imaginal. It is not yet cognitive. Only through cognition 
at the higher level of unreflective or perceptive consciousness does it 
begin to put on the raiment of images, ideas, and the rest, and thus find 
expression in the supraliminal field. 
On this alternative view not only are there no inherited memories in 
any form or guise, but there are no memory-images in existence save 
as correlative to an existent process of conscious remembering. One 
opens up here the whole problem of retention. What is retained—the 
- ————— se CU 
er Oe Cymer a Tt = 
blossoms of imagery, or the conditions under which they will in due 
season appear? ‘The plant does not retain flowers; but its abiding 
nature is such that flowers are put forth under the influence of external 
conditions at a recurring stage of constitutional life-balance. This 
analogy may be rejected. If so the grounds of rejection should be 
clearly set forth. Is it on the ground that lilac-blossoms are not stored 
but that my memory-image of those I saw last spring is stored? One 
may then ask whether there is any better scientific evidence for the 
latter than for the former. M. Bergson is unwearied in his reiteration 
of the absurdity of supposing that images are stored in the brain. 
But M. Bergson contends that memory-images are stored in the 
‘obscure depths ’ of a realm of being quite disparate from that of the 
brain. All that one has ever experienced is thus retained. ‘TI believe,’ 
says M. Bergson, that ‘our past life is there, preserved even in the 
minutest detail; sothing is forgotten; all that we have perceived, 
thought, willed, from the first awakening of our consciousness, persists 
indefinitely. But the memories which are preserved in these obscure 
_ depths are for us in the state of invisible phantoms.’ If this is to be 
Pit 
accepted as ‘ scientific truth’ the man of science may reasonably ask 
for such evidence as he is accustomed to demand in other branches of 
scientific inquiry. And if it is part of the metaphysics which we are 
‘to superpose upon scientific truth ’ this should be more clearly stated 
than some at least of M. Bergson’s disciples are wont to state it. At 
all events the status of images, ideas, wishes, and thoughts in the 
unconscious—nay deeper than that whether as such they are there 
