Psychology affords us not the least help in this matter, for in
describing memory as a faculty of the mind or the conservative faculty
it does no more than present us with a name in place of our explanation.
But we do get nearer realities when we go down to the organic aptitude
which, in consequence of an action, there is to the recurrence of a
similar action on another occasion. And physiology presents us with many
illustrations of such organized aptitudes. Take, for example, the
education of our movements: a designed movement is performed at first
slowly and clumsily, and it is only by giving great pains to it and
frequently repeating it that we acquire the skill to perform it easily
and quickly; the aptitude thereto being at last so completely organized
in the proper nervous centres that it may be performed without
consciousness on our part, quite automatically. Thus it appears that
memory in this case becomes less conscious as it becomes more complete,
until, when it has reached its greatest perfection and is performed with
the most facility, it is entirely unconscious. After which, if we are
psychologists who are content to rest in words and forbear to pursue the
facts which they denote, we must cease to speak of it as memory: it has
become custom, or habit, or automatism. But if we go beneath words to
the property of the motor nerve-centres whereby they react in a definite
way to impressions made upon them, organically register their
experience, and so acquire by education their special faculties, we
perceive that we have not to do in the higher nerve-centres with
fundamentally different properties of nerve element, but with different
functions which depend upon the same fundamental property. Substitute
the highest nerve-centres for the motor nerve-centres, and the complex
idea for the complex movement, and what has been said of the latter is
strictly true of the former; the idea, like the movement, is accompanied
with less consciousness the more completely it is organized, and when it
has been completely organized it takes its part automatically in our
mental operations, being performed, as a habitual movement is performed,
automatically. The physiological condition of memory is, then, the
organic process by which nerve-experiences in the different centres are
registered; and to recollect is to revive these experiences in the
highest centres, the functions of which are attended with
consciousness--to stimulate, by external or internal causes, their
residua, aptitudes, dispositions, or whatever else we may choose to call
them, into functional activity. Stimulated from without, they constitute
recognition, that is, cognition with memory of former cognition;
stimulated from within, they constitute recollection.
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