658 PSYCHOLOGY. 



in fact, the recalled event does appear without a definite 

 setting, it is hard to distinguish it from a mere creation of 

 fancy. But in proportion as its image lingers and recalls as- 

 sociates which gradually become more definite, it grows more 

 and more distinctly into a remembered thing. For example, 

 I enter a friend's room and see on the wall a painting. At 

 first I have the strange, wondering consciousness, ' surely 

 I have seen that before,' but when or how does not become 

 clear. There only clings to the picture a sort of penumbra 

 of familiarity, — when suddenly I exclaim : " I have it, it is 

 a copy of part of one of the Fra Angelicos in the Floren- 

 tine Academy — I recollect it there ! " But the motive to 

 the recall does not lie in the fact that the brain-tract now 

 excited by the painting was once before excited in a similar 

 way ; it lies simply and solely in the fact that with that 

 brain-tract other tracts also are excited : those which sus- 

 tain my friend's room with all its peculiarities, on the one 

 hand ; those which sustain the mental image of the Florence 

 Academy, on the other hand, with the circumstances of my 

 visit there ; and finally those which make me (more dimly) 

 think of the years I have lived through between these two 

 times. The result of this total brain-disturbance is a 

 thought with a peculiar object^ namely, that I who now 

 stand here with this picture before me, stood so many years 

 ago in the Florentine Academy looking at its original. 



M. Taine has described the gradual way in which a 

 mental image develops into an object of memory, in hia 

 usual vivid fashion. He says : 



"I meet casually in the street a person whose appearance I am 

 acquainted with, and say to myself at once that I have seen him before. 

 Instantly the figure recedes into the past, and wavers about there 

 Ta.guely, without at once fixing itself in any spot. It persists in me for 



conception of the kind of thing that has been going on, with a more or leca 

 clear sense of the total time it has lasted, this latter being based on an 

 automatic counting of the successive pulses of thought by which tbe 

 process is from moment to moment recognized as being always the same. 

 Within the few seconds which constitute the specious present there is an 

 intuitive perception of tbe successive moments. But these moments, of 

 which we have a primary memory-image, are not properly recalled from 

 the past, our knowledge of them is in no way analogous to a memory prop- 

 erly so called. Cf. supra, p. 646. 



