2. _Familiarity._--Images and perceptions may come to us, and so may
words or other bodily movements, with more or less of the feeling we
call “familiarity”. When you recall a tune that you have heard before,
either by images or by actually singing it, part of what comes to you
may feel familiar, part unfamiliar. This may lead you to judge that
you have remembered the familiar part rightly and the unfamiliar part
wrongly, but this judgment belongs to a later stage.
3. _Habit-Memory._--We have already discussed this in Chapter VI.
People say they remember a poem if they can repeat it correctly.
But this does not necessarily involve any recollection of a past
occurrence; you may have quite forgotten when and where you read the
poem. This sort of memory is mere habit, and is essentially like
knowing how to walk although you cannot remember learning to walk. This
does not deserve to be called memory in the strict sense.
4. _Recognition._--This has two forms. (_a_) When you see a dog, you
can say to yourself “there is a dog”, without recalling any case in
which you have seen a dog before, and even without reflecting that
there have been such cases. This involves no knowledge about the past;
essentially it is only an associative habit. (_b_) You may know “I
saw this before”, though you do not know when or where, and cannot
recollect the previous occurrence in any way. In such a case there is
knowledge about the past, but it is very slight. When you judge: “I saw
_this_ before”, the word “this” must be used vaguely, because you did
not see exactly what you see now, but only something very like this.
Thus all that you are really knowing is that, on some past occasion,
you saw something very like what you are seeing now. This is about the
minimum of knowledge about the past that actually occurs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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