MEMORY. 653 



MEMORY'S CAUSES. 



Sucli being the phenomenon of memory, or the analysis 

 of its object, can we see how it comes to pass ? can we 

 lay bare its causes ? 



Its complete exercise presupposes two things : 



1) The retention of the remembered fact ; 



2) Its reminiscence, recollection, reproduction, or recaU. 

 Now the cause both of retention and of recollection is the law 



of habit in the nervous system, ivorking as it does in the ' asso' 

 (nation of ideas.' 



Associationists have long explained recollection by asso- 

 ciation. James Mill gives an account of it which I am unable 

 to improve upon, unless it might be by translating his word 

 * idea ' into ' thing thought of,' or ' object,' as explained so 

 often before. 



"There is," he says, " a state of mind familiar to all men, in which 

 we are said to remember. In this state it is certain we have not in the 

 mind the idea which we are trying to have in it.* How is it, then, that 

 we proceed in the course of our endeavor, to procure its introduction 

 into the mind ? If we have not the idea itself, we have certain ideas 

 connected with it. We run over those ideas, one after another, in hopes 

 that some one of them will suggest the idea we are in quest of ; 

 and if any one of them does, it is always one so connected with it as 

 to call it up in the way of association. I meet an old acquaintance, 

 whose name I do not remember, and wish to recollect. I run over a 

 number of names, in hopes that some of them may be associated with the 

 idea of the individual. I think of all the circumstances in which I have 

 seen him engaged ; the time when I ksevv him, the persons along with 

 whom I knew him, the things he did, or the things he suffered ; and, 

 if I chance upon any idea with which the name is associated, then imme- 

 diately I have the recollection; ifnf)t. my pursuit of it is vain, f There 

 is another set of cases, very familiar, but affording very important evi- 

 dence on the subject. It frequently happens that there are matters 

 which we desire not to forget. What is the contrivance to which we 

 have recourse for preserving the memory — that is, for making sure that 

 it will be called into existence, when it is our wish that it should i All 

 men invariably employ the same expedient. They endeavor to form 



* Compare, however, p. 251. Chapter IX. 



f Professor Bain adds, in a note to this passage of Mill's : "This process 

 seems best expressed by laying down a law of Compound or Composite 

 Association, under which a plurality of feeble links of connection may be 

 a substitute for one powerful and self-sufficing link." 



