ME.V'OIiT. 683 



nothing we experience can be absolutely forgotten. In 

 real life, in spite of occasional surprises, most of what hap- 

 pens actually is forgotten. The only reasons for supposing 

 that if the conditions were forthcoming ever^^thing would 

 revive are of a transcendental sort. Sir Wm. Hamilton 

 quotes and adopts them from the German writer Schmid. 

 Knowledge being a 'spontaneous self -energy' on the part 

 of the mind. 



" this energy being once determined, it is natural that it should persist, 

 until again annihilated by other causes. This [annihilation] would be 

 the case, were the mind merely passive. . . . But the mental activity, 

 the act of knowledge, of which I now speak, is more than this ; it is an 

 energy of the self-active power of a subject one and indivisible : conse- 

 quently a part of the ego must be detached or annihilated, if a cogni- 

 tion once existent be again extinguished. Hence it is that the problem 

 most difficult of solution is not, how a mental activity endures, but how 

 it ever vanishes." * 



Those whom such an argument persuades may be J.-.' 

 happy with their belief. Other positive argument there is 

 none, none certainly of a physiological sort.f 



When memory begins to decay, ])ro}ier nnmes are what 

 go first, and at all times })roper names are harder to recol- 

 lect than those of general ])r()perties and classes of things. 



This seems due to the fact that common qualities and 

 names have contracted an infinitely greater number of asso- 

 ciations in our mind than the names of most of the persons 

 whom we know. Their memorj^ is better organized. Proper 

 names as well organized as those of our family and friends are 

 recollected as well as those of any other objects. J 'Organ- 

 ization' means numerous associations; and the more numer- 

 ous the associations, the greater the number of paths of re- 

 call. For the same reason adjectives, conjunctions, preposi- 

 tions, and the cardinal verbs, those words, in short, which 

 form the grammatical framework of all our speech, are the 



* Lectures on Metaph., ii 213. 



f Cf. on this point J Delbanif, Le Sorameil et les Reves (1885), p. 119 

 ff. ; R. Verdon, Forgftfulness, in INIind, ii. 437. 

 J C f. A. Maury, Le Sommeil et les Reves, p. 442. 



