MEMORY. 687 



ulso ought to make tlie discharge more violent and the 

 path more deep. A similar reason doubtless accounts for 

 the familiar fact that we remember our own theories, our 

 own discoveries, combinations, inventions, in short what- 

 ever ' ideas ' originate in our own brain, a thousand times 

 better than exactly similar things which are communicated 

 to us from without. 



A word, in closing, about the metaphysics involved 

 in remembering. According to the assumptions of this 

 book, thoughts accompany the brain's workings, and those 

 thoughts are cognitive of realities. The whole relation is one 

 which we can only write down empirically, confessing that 

 no glimmer of explanation of it is yet in sight. That brains 

 should give rise to a knowing consciousness at all, this is the 

 one mystery which returns, no matter of what sort the con- 

 sciousness and of what sort the knowledge may be. Sen- 

 sations, aware of mere qualities, involve the mystery as 

 much as thoughts, aware of complex systems, involve it. To 

 the platonizing tradition in philosophy, however, this is 

 not so. Sensational consciousness is something quasi-Ttia,- 

 terial, hardly cognitive, which one need not much wonder 

 at. Rdating consciousness is quite the reverse, and the 

 mystery of it is unspeakable. Professor Ladd, for exam- 

 ple, in his usually excellent book,* after well showing the 

 matter-of-fact dependence of retention and reproduction on 

 brain-paths, says : 



"In the study of perception psycho-physics can do much towards a 

 scientific explanation. It can tell what qualities of stimuli produce 

 certain qualities of sensations, it can suggest a principle relating the 

 quantity of the stimuli to the intensity of the sensation ; it can investi- 

 gate the laws under which, by combined action of various excitations, 

 the sensations are comhined [?] into presentations of sense ; it can show 

 how the time-relations of the sensations and percepts in consciousness 

 correspond to the objective relations in time of the stimulations. But 

 for that spiritual activity which actually puts together in consciousness 

 the sensations, it cannot even suggest the beginning of a physical 

 explanation. Moreover, no cerebral process can be conceived of, which 

 — in case it were known to exist— could possibly be regarded as a fitting 

 basis for this unifying actus of mind. Thus also, and even more em- 

 phatically, must we insist upon the complete inability of physiology to 



* Physiological Psychology, pt. n. chap. x. § 23. 



