680 PSYCHOLOGY 



even of those which are struck deepest, and in minds the most retentive; 

 so that if they be not sometimes renewed by repeated exercise of the 

 senses, or reflection on those kinds of objects which at first occasioned 

 them, the print wears out, and at hist there remains nothing t-o be seen. 

 Thus the ideas, as well as children, of our youth, often die before us; and 

 our minds represent to us those tombs to which we are fast approaching; 

 where, though the brass and marble remain, yet the inscriptions 

 are effaced by time, and the imagery moulders away. The pictures 

 drawn in our minds are laid in fading colors; and, if not sometimes 

 refreshed, vanish and disappear. How much the constitution of our 

 bodies, and the make of our animal spirits, are concerned in this; 

 and whether the temper of the brain makes this difference, that in some 

 it retains the characters drawn on it like marble, in others like free- 

 stone, and in others little better than sand, I shall not here inquire, 

 though it may seem probable that the constitution of the body does 

 sometimes influence the memory; since we oftentimes find a disease 

 quite strip the mind of all its ideas, and the flames of a fever in a few 

 days calcine all those images to dust and confusion, which seemed to 

 be as lasting as if graven in marble." * 



This peculiar mixture of forgetting with our remember- 

 ing is but one instance of our mind's selective activity. 

 Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. 

 And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we 

 remembered everything, we should on most occasions be 

 as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take as 

 long for us to recall a space of time as it took the original 

 time to elajDse, and we should never get ahead with our 

 thinking. All recollected times undergo, accordingly, what 

 M. Ribot calls foreshortening ; and this foreshortening is 

 due to the omission of an enormous number of the facts 

 which filled them. 



"As fast as the present enters into the past, our states of consciousness 

 disappear and are obliterated. Passed in review at a few days' distance, 

 nothing or little of them remains : most of them have made shipwi'eck 

 in that great nonentity from which they never more will emerge, and 

 they have carded with them the quantity of duration which was inher- 

 ent in their being. This deficit of surviving conscious states is thus a 

 deficit in the amount of represented time. The process of abridgment, 

 of foreshortening; of which we have spoken, presupposes this deficit. 

 If, in order to reach a distant reminiscence, we had to go through the 

 entire series of terms which separate it from our present selves, memory 

 would become impossible on account of the length of the operation. We 



* Essay cone. Human Understanding, ii. x. 5. 



