MEMORY. 657 



it with any reference to the past The gutter is worn 

 deeper by each successive shower, but not for that reason 

 brought into contact with previous showers. Psychology 

 (whicn Dr. Maudsley in his next sentence says " affords us 

 not the least help in this matter ") puts us on the track of 

 an at least possible brain-explanation. As it is the setting 

 of the idea, when it recurs, which makes us conscious 

 of it as past, so it can be no intrinsic modification of the 

 • nerve-element ' N which is the organic condition of mem- 

 ory, but something extrinsic to it altogether, namely, its con- 

 nections with those other nerve-elements which we called 

 O — that letter standing in the scheme for the cerebral sub- 

 stratum of a great plexus of things other than the principal 

 event remembered, dates, names, concrete surroundings, 

 'realized intervals, and what not. The 'modification ' is the 

 formation in the plastic nerve-substance of the system of 

 associative paths between N and O. 



The only hypothesis, in short, to which the facts of 

 inward experience give countenance is that the hrain-tracts 

 excited by the event proper, and those excited in its recall, are 

 in part different from each other. If we could revive the 

 past event without any associates we should exclude the 

 possibility of memory, and simply dr«- am that we were un- 

 dergoing the experience as if for the first time.* Wherever, 



* The only fact which might plausibly be alleged against this view is the 

 familiar one that we may feel the lapse of time in an experience so monot- 

 onous that its earlier portions can have no ' associates ' different from its 

 later ones. Sit with closed eyes, for example, and steadily pronounce some 

 vowel-sound, thus, a— a— a— a— a— . . . . thinking only of the sound. 

 Nothing changes during the time occupied by the experiment , and yet at 

 the end of it you know that its beginning was far away. I think, how- 

 ever, that a close attention to what happens during this experiment shows 

 that it does not violate in the least the conditions of recall laid down 

 in the text ; and that if the moment to which we mentally hark back lie 

 many seconds behind the present instant, it always has different associates 

 by which we define its date. Thus it was when I had just breathed 

 out, or in ; or it was the ' first moment ' of the performance, the one ' pre 

 ceded by silence ; ' or it was ' one very close to that ; ' or it was * one when 

 we were looking forward instead of back, as now ; ' or it is simply repre- 

 sented by a number and conceived symbolically with no definite image 

 of its date. It seems to me that I have no really intuitive discrimination 

 of the different past moments after the experience has gone on some little 

 time, but that back of the ' specious present ' they all fuse into a single 



