CHAPTER XVI. 



MEMORY. 



In tlie last cliapter what concerned us was the direct 

 intuition of time. We found it limited to intervals of con- 

 siderably less than a minute. Beyond its borders extends 

 the immense region of conceived time, past and future, into 

 one direction or another of which we mentally project all 

 the events which we think of as real, and form a systematic 

 order of them by giving to each a date. The relation of con- 

 ceived to intuited time is just like that of the fictitious sjjace 

 pictured on the flat back-scene of a theatre to the actual 

 space of the stage. The objects painted on the former (trees, 

 columns, houses in a receding street, etc.) carry back the 

 series of similar objects solidly placed upon the latter, and 

 we think we see things in a continuous perspective, when 

 we really see thus only a few of them and imagine that we 

 see the rest. The chapter which lies before us deals with 

 the way in which we paint the remote j^ast, as it were, upon 

 a canvas in onr memory, and yet often imagine that we 

 have direct vision of its depths. 



The stream of thought flows on ; but most of its seg- 

 ments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, 

 no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, 

 it is confined to a few moments, hours, or days. Others, 

 again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means 

 of which they may be recalled as long as life endures. Can 

 we explain these differences? 



PRIMARY MEMORY. 



The first point to be noticed is that for a state of mind 

 to survive in memory it must have endured for a certain length 

 of time. In other words, it must be what I call a substan- 

 tive state. Prepositional and conjunctival states of mind 

 are not remembered as independent facts — we cannot recall 



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