322 The Mnemonic Phenomenon 
it is well to repeat again, each elementary sensation or 
representation would consist not so much in a specific 
vibration of the nervous substance at this or that point 
as in the production by the action of external stimuli 
of a given specific nervous current. In this way the 
memory of an elementary sensation or representation 
would consist only in the reproduction, by the action of 
causes now internal, of the same specific nervous current. 
In other words the way in which the hypothesis of 
mnemonic elements or specific elementary accumulators 
would conceive of the mnemonic phenomena is as 
follows: 
A series of sounds or of words, for example a certain 
melody, or some phrase of a discourse, when once it has 
entered by the ear, we can imagine, produces a series 
of nervous currents in the auditory nerve specifically 
different from one another, just as in a telephone the 
successive electric currents are specifically different from 
one another (in this particular case different in intensity) 
which the same series of sounds produces in the receptive 
apparatus and later transmits along the wire. If then 
one or several nerve centers, after receiving these spe- 
cifically different currents, are capable of storing up these 
specific energies, each distinct from the other, and to 
reproduce them unaltered later at the moment of dis- 
charge, and if, further, the discharge of each immediately 
preceding specific energy and it alone is capable of pro- 
ducing the liberation of the specific energy immediately 
following, (and we have seen above that this is one 
consequence of the hypothesis of specific elementary 
accumulators), it will be in this way possible for the 
same succession of different ideas or impressions to be 
