2 PSYCHOLOGY. 



of succession, sucli things as reminiscences, perceptions, 

 emotions, volitions, passions, theories, tand all the other 

 furnishinj^s of an individual's mind may be engendered. 

 The very Self or ego of the individual comes in this 

 way to be viewed no longer as the pre-existing source of 

 the representations, but rather as their last and most com- 

 plicated fruit. 



Now, if we strive rigorously to simplify the phenomena 

 in either of these ways, we soon become aware of inade- 

 quacies in our method. Any particular cognition, for ex- 

 ample, or recollection, is accounted for on the soul-theory 

 by being referred to the spiritual faculties of Cognition 

 or of Memory. These faculties themselves are thought 

 of as absolute properties of the soul ; that is, to take 

 the case of memory, no reason is given why we should 

 remember a fact as it happened, except that so to re- 

 member it constitutes the essence of our Recollective 

 Power. We may, as spiritualists, try to explain our mem- 

 ory's failures and blunders by secondary causes. But 

 its successes can invoke no factors save the existence of 

 certain objective things to be remembered on the one 

 hand, and of our faculty of memory on the other. When, 

 for instance, I recall my graduation-day, and drag all its 

 incidents and emotions up from death's dateless night, no 

 mechanical cause can explain this process, nor can any 

 analysis reduce it to lower terms or make its nature seem 

 other than an ultimate datum, which, whether we rebel or 

 not at its mysteriousness, must simply be taken for granted 

 if we are to psychologize at all. However the associationist 

 may represent the present ideas as thronging and arranging 

 themselves, still, the spiritualist insists, he has in the end to 

 admit that something, be it brain, be it ' ideas,' be it ' asso- 

 ciation,' knoivs past time as past, and fills it out with this 

 or that event. And when the spiritualist calls memory an 

 'irreducible faculty,' he says no more than this admission 

 of the associationist already grants. 



And yet the admission is far from being a satisfactory 

 simplification of the concrete facts. For why should this 

 absolute god-given Faculty retain so much better the events 

 of yesterday than those of last year, and, best of all, those 



