MEMORY. 675 



There is a curious experience whicli everyone seems to 

 have had — the feeling that the present moment in its com- 

 pleteness has been experienced before — we were saying just 

 this thing, in just this place, to just these people, etc. This 

 ' sense of pre-existeuce ' has been treated as a great mys- 

 tery and occasioned much speculation. Dr. Wigan con- 

 sidered it due to a dissociation of the action of the two hemi- 

 spheres, one of them becoming conscious a little later than 

 the other, but both of the same fact.* I must confess that 



recognized as the face that struck me so before; when the dingy and red- 

 dened woodwork, the purple-flowing floor, the smell, the emotion of dis- 

 gust, and all the details, in a word, forthwith re-establish therapelves as 

 familiar occupants of my mind ; the extraneous associates of the past time 

 are anything but prominent. Again, in trying to think of an engraving, 

 say the portrait of Rajah Brooke prefixed to his biography, I can do so 

 only partially; but when I take down the book and, looking at the actual 

 face, am smitten with the intimate sense of its sameness with the one I was 

 striving to resuscitate, — where in the experience is the element of extrinsic 

 association? In both these cases it surely /ee^s as if the moment when the 

 sense of recall is most vivid were also the moment when all extraneous 

 associates were most suppressed. The butcher's face recalls the former 

 walls of the shambles; their thought recalls the groaning beasts, and they 

 the face again, just as I now experience them, with no different past ingre- 

 iient. In like manner the peculiar deepening of my consciousness of the 

 Rajah's physiognomy at the moment when I open the book and say "Ah! 

 that's the very face! " is so intense as to banish from my mind all collateral 

 circumstances, whether of the present or of former experiences. But here 

 it is the nose preparing tracts for the eye, the eye preparing them for the 

 mouth, the mouth preparing them for the nose again, all these processes 

 involving paths of contiguous association, as defended in the text. I can- 

 not agree, therefore, with Prof. Hoffding, in spite of my respect for him as 

 a psychologist, that the phenomenon of instantaneous recognition is only 

 explicable through the recall and comparison of the thing with its own 

 past image. Nor can I see in the facts in question any additional ground fo> 

 reinstating the general notion which we have already rejected (sup)-a, p. 

 592) that a ' sensation ' is ever received into the mind by an 'image' ol 

 its own past self. It is received by contiguous associates; or if they form 

 too faint a fringe, its neural currents run into a bed which is still ' warm * 

 from just-previous currents, and which consequently feel different from 

 currents whose bed is cold. I agree, however, with Hoffding that Dr, 

 Lehmann's experiments (many of them) do not seem to prove the point 

 which he seeks to establish. Lehmann, indeed, seems himself to believe 

 chat we recognize a sensation A by comparing it with its own past image 

 <x (loc. cit. p. 114), in which opinion I altogether fail to concur. 



* Duality of the Mind, p. 84 The same thesis is defended by the late 

 Mr. R. H. Proctor, who gives some cases rather hard to reconcile with my 

 own proposed explanation, in 'Knowledge' for Nov. 8, 1884. See also 

 Ribot, Maladies de la Menioire, p. 149 ff. 



