652 P8YCHOL007. 



billed as not to be separable, the idea of my having formerly had those 

 same ideas. And this idea of my liaving formerly had those ideas is a 

 very complicated idea ; including the idea of myself of the present mo- 

 ment remembering, and that of myself of the past moment conceiving; 

 and the whole series of the states of consciousness, which intervened 

 between myself remembering, and myself conceiving." * 



Memory is then the feeling of belief in a peculiar com- 

 plex object ; but all the elements of this object may be 

 known to other states of belief ; nor is there in the particular 

 combination of them as they appear in memory anything 

 so peculiar as to lead us to oppose the latter to other sorts 

 of thought as something altogether sui generis, needing a 

 special faculty to account for it. When later we come to 

 our chapter on Belief w^e shall see that any represented 

 object which is connected either mediately or immediately 

 with our present sensations or emotional activities tends 

 to be believed in as a reality. The sense of a pecu- 

 liar active relation in it to ourselves is what gives to an 

 object the characteristic quality of reality, and a merely 

 imagined past event differs from a recollected one only in 

 the absence of this peculiar-feeling relation. The electric 

 current, so to speak, between it and our present self 

 does not close. But in their other determinations the re- 

 recollected past and the imaginary past may be much the 

 same. In other words, there is nothing unique in the object 

 of memory, and no special faculty is needed to account for 

 its formation. It is a synthesis of parts thought of as re- 

 lated together, perception, imagination, comparison and 

 reasoning being analogous syntheses of parts into complex 

 objects. The objects of any of these faculties may awaken 

 belief or fail to awaken it ; the object of memory is only an 

 object imagined in the past (usually very completely imagined 

 there) to ivhich the emotion of belief adheres. 



* Analysis, l. 330-1. Mill believed that the various things remembered, 

 the self included, enter consciousness in the form of separate ideas, but so 

 rapidly that they are 'all clustered into one.' "Ideas called up in close 

 conjunction . . . assume, even when there is the greatest complexity, the 

 appearance, not of many ideas, but of one " (vol. i. p. 123). This mythol' 

 ogy does not imp"ir the accuracy of his description of memory's oiject. 



