22 
LE CONTE. 
it in ourselves. This may seem a very paradoxical state¬ 
ment. It will be at once objected that animals seem to have 
memory; they behave exactly as if they had; they profit by 
experience; learn habits ; are capable of education, &c.; all 
of which seems impossible without memory. What, then, is 
the difference between such memory and what we know as 
memory in ourselves ? It is this: The events remembered 
by animals are not appreciated as past events in the history 
of self, of the ego. There is no consciousness of self as ab¬ 
stracted from conscious phenomena, and no conception of 
time as abstracted from events, and therefore no conception 
of events as occurring in the history of the ego. An impres¬ 
sion, pleasing or painful, is made on the nerve-terminals, is 
transmitted to the brain, determines molecular changes there, 
which in their turn determine psychical changes in con¬ 
sciousness, emotions, desires, <fcc., and these again determine 
corresponding actions. Now, whenever the sense-impres¬ 
sion is repeated the corresponding feelings are reproduced 
and appropriate actions follow. All these phenomena, phys¬ 
ical and psychical, are so closely united that the whole may 
be regarded as in some sense automatic. In the lowest ani¬ 
mals and in sensitive plants the automatism is evident and 
admitted by all; but in higher animals, partly because the 
phenomena are really higher and partly because we inject 
our own self-consciousness into them, it seems very like what 
takes place in ourselves; but in fact there is a wide difference. 
In man we have exactly the same interconnected series, but 
in addition, and on account of the idea of self as abstracted 
from the phenomena of consciousness and of time as ab¬ 
stracted from events, these changes are transformed into an 
idea of an event occurring in the history of the ego. 
PROVED BY HISTORY OF THE INDIVIDUAL. 
If we need any proof of this distinction we find it in our 
own individual history. The child a year old, or even a 
few months old, seems also to the outside observer to have 
memory. It profits by experience, learns habits, good or 
