16 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 



Coming to the Intellect, we find it manifesting itself in various 

 modes, called memory, imagination, reason, etc. Might it not ap- 

 pear that hei'e at least we have risen above the physical encumbrances 

 which surround the lower manifestations 1 Let us briefly examine 

 two of what the Scottish philosophers would call " faculties," and see 

 how far memory and imagination are independent of bodily condi- 

 tions and changes. The philosophers referred to treated these mental 

 states as God-given faculties, independent altogether of bodily influ- 

 ence. This was the only consistent position open to them. But 

 their theoi-y is now but seldom heard of, except through the still 

 small voice of Dr. McCosh, of Princeton 1 



What we are concerned with here is not an analysis of Memory in 

 the abstract, but the pointing out what may be said to be an incon- 

 trovertible fact, that the commencement of acquisition, the rules 

 of acquisition, and the use of acquisition and recollection, are all 

 directly, if not entirely, dependent on bodily states and organisms. 

 The content of memory is but those impressions and feelings whose 

 existence is dependent upon nervous action, and but represents the 

 great mass of our nervous growths and nervous combinations. When 

 a feeling or impression is renewed, what is its seat 1 Beyond a doubt, 

 the renewed feeling occupies the very same parts, and in the very 

 same manner, as the original feeling, and no other parts, and in 

 no other manner, that can be assigned. The seat of the memory of 

 an impression is the seat of that impression in its origin. Thus the 

 persistent memory of a bright color fatigues the nerves of sight. 

 There is no one seat of memory ; but each memory has its own seat, 

 appropriate- to its character. Indeed, as has been said, there is no 

 such thing as memory, but only memories. " Every tract of nerve 

 tissue is its own autobiographer." Memory is not, as the vague 

 phrase of common speech has it, " in the soul" ; it is fixed in its 

 birthplace, in the nervous system. Ribot may, after all, be right in 

 Saving that a well-stored memory is but a collection of impressions 

 and of an assemblage of " dynamic associations," very stable and 

 very readily called forth. 



The pathology of memory is interesting here, mainly as shewing 

 how subject is memory to the fundamental conditions of life, and to 

 the varying condition of the bodily organism. Reference may be 

 made to the many examples given by Ribot ; one of the most curi- 

 ous of which, in this connection, is that of a Frenchman, living in 



