IV.
The Neo-Platonic psychology of memory is represented by Plotinus.[32]He discusses the subject at considerable length, and presents a somewhat original doctrine. Memory does not belong to God nor to the divine immutable intelligence in man, which knows by direct intellectual perception. It is a function of the soul and first appears when the world soul is individualized in bodies. Memory, however, has no basis in the physical organism,nor does the soul impress the sensations upon the body. The effects of sensations are not like impressions made by a seal, nor are they reactions (ἀντερείσεις), or configurations (τυπώσεις), but in sense-perception as in thought the soul is active. In memory, too, the soul is active, not passive. The influence of the body proves nothing against this. The changeable nature of the body may cause us to forget, but it cannot condition positive recollection. The body is the river of Lethe, but memory belongs to the soul. The part of the soul to which memory belongs is the image-forming faculty. Thisholds sense impressions as well as thought. Two souls, the higher and the lower, are concerned in memory. When the soul leaves the body, the recollections of the lower soul are soon forgotten in proportion as the higher soul rises toward the intelligible world.[33]
St. Augustine developed the views of the Neo-Platonists in regard to memory. With him memory is a faculty of animals, men, and angels. God, whose immutable essence is above the sphere of movement and change, does not remember.Everything is seen by him in one indivisible and unchangeable present.
Augustine does not agree with Aristotle that some animals are devoid of memory. He attributes memory even to fishes, and relates in confirmation of this opinion an incident that he had observed. There was a large fountain filled with fishes. People came daily to see them and often fed them. The fishes remembered what they received; and as soon as any one came to the fountain they crowded together expecting their accustomed food. But Augustine does not suppose that animals have that higher memory which is purelyintellectual, although he probably failed to see how purely mechanical and involuntary their so-called acts of memory are. Memory with St. Augustine, as in the psychology of Plotinus, is a function of the soul, not of the body. ButwithAristotleherefers it to the central sense.[34]
What is memory? It is thinking of what one knows. All the various modifications of the soul cannot all be present to us at once. There is a difference between knowing a thing andthinking of it. The musician, says Augustine, knows music, but he does not think of it when he is talking about Geometry.[35]The ideas relating to music are in the mind in a latent state. Augustine anticipates Leibnitz in discussing the unconscious modifications of ourownideas; but he speaks especially of their gradual decay, while Leibnitz considers the unconscious growth of them. “Many numbers”,[36]Augustine says, “are graduallyeffaced from memory; for they remain not an instant unaltered. Indeed what is not found in memory after a year is somewhat diminished even after one day. But this diminution is imperceptible; yet it is not wrongly inferred; for it does not suddenly all vanish the day before the year is up. Hence we may conclude that from the moment it was engraved in memory it began to slip away.”[37]This doctrine of unconscious mental changes and unconscious mental states is one of the most remarkable features of Augustine’s psychology. With irresistible logiche demonstrates the existence of such states in the following passage from another place:—
“But what when the memory itself loses anything, as falls out when we forget and seek that we may recollect? Where, in the end, do we search, but in the memory itself? And there, if one thing be, perchance, offered instead of another, we reject it, until what we seek meets us; and when it doth we say ‘This is it’; which we should not unless we recognized it, nor recognize it, unless we remembered it——For we do not believe it as something new, but upon recollection, allow what was named to be right.But were it utterly blotted out of the mind, we should not remember it, even when reminded. For we have not as yet utterly forgotten that which we remember ourselves to have forgotten. What, then, we have utterly forgotten, though lost, we cannot even seek after.”[38]It would not be difficult to find passages in modern psychologies that read almost like translations of this chapter of Augustine’s Confessions.
Two kinds of memory—sense memory and intellectual memory are distinguished in the Augustinian psychology. The former preserves and reproducesnot only the images of visible objects, but also the impressions of sounds, odors and other objects which strike our senses.[39]The images are not like theeidolaof Democritus, but are ideal, formed by the mind from its own essence. Intellectual memory contains our knowledge of the sciences, of literature, and dialectic, and of the questions relating to these subjects.[40]This memory, unlike the memory of sense, contains not the images of things, but the things themselves. These ideas which the intellectual memorystores up are in a sense innate. They never came to us through the senses. They could never have been taught to us, unless we had already had them in our memories. “When I learned them I gave not credit to another man’s mind, but recognized them in mine.” Thus the memory contains the idea of truth and of God.
Augustine points out, too, what has been repeated by Locke and others until it has become a platitude, that we do not remember objects themselves, but the ideas which we have gained from them. And with his usual subtlety he shows that much of what is ordinarily attributedto perception is really the work of memory.
“We see what importance St. Augustine attaches to memory. It is in his view the faculty which preserves the ideas relatingnotonly to the body, but to the soul, not only to eternal truths, but to the Eternal Being himself——. This memory, which is peculiar to man, and which animals do not possess—this memory, which in a mysterious manner contains in it intelligible realities, is, according to the Bishop of Hippo, one of the three great faculties of man, and the origin of the other two. It is from it that intelligence arises, and the will proceedsfrom the one to the other and unites them. Thus, if it is allowed to compare things human with things divine, we have in us an image of the august Trinity. Memory, in which is the matter of knowledge, and which is as the place of intelligible things, offers some resemblance to the Father; the intellect, which is derivedfromand formed from it, is not without analogy to the Son; and love or will, which unites the intelligible (or memory) to the intellect has a certain resemblance to the Holy Spirit.”[41]The phenomenaof memory were also important with Augustine as weapons against materialism. By memory the soul knows objects of sense when it no longer perceives them, and, moreover, combines the heterogeneous in ways inexplicable by means of a physchical substance. And again the soul can form abstract conceptions of space and mathematical truths.
The well-known conditions of a good memory, such as acuteness of sensation, order, and repetition, Augustine notices only incidentally. More attention is given to the relation of the will to memory and to the association of ideas.
Whether we remember or not depends upon the will. By an act of will we avert the memory from sense-perceptions, as, for example, when we hear a speaker and do not notice what he says, or read a page and do not know what we have read, or walk with our attention upon something else. In all these cases we perceive, but do not remember our perceptions. So, too, recollection depends upon the will: “As the will applies thesense to thebody (or external object), so it applies the memory to the sense, and the eye of the mind of the thinker to the memory.”[42]
This power of the will over memory is, however, limited by the association of ideas. In order to recall anything by a voluntary effort we must remember the general notion of the thing or some associated idea. “For example, if I wish to remember what I supped on yesterday, either I have already remembered that I did sup, or if not yet this, at least, I have remembered something about that time itself, if nothing else; at all events, I have remembered yesterday and that part of yesterday in which people usually sup, and what suppingis.”[43]In another place he says that, of a series of ideas the lost part is recovered “by the part whereof we had hold.”
Many since Augustine have marvelled at the miracle of memory. None have expressed their admiration more eloquently. “Great is this force of memory”, he exclaims, “excessive great, O my God; a large and boundless chamber; who ever sounded the bottom thereof? Yet is this a power of mine, and belongs unto my nature; nor do I myself comprehend all that I am. Therefore is the mind too strait to containitself. And where should that be which it containeth, not of itself? Is it without and not within? How then doth it not comprehend itself. A wonderful admiration surprises me, amazement seizes me upon this. And men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty billows of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, and pass themselves by; nor wonder that when I spake of all these things, I did not see them with my eyes, yet could not have spoken of them, unless I then actually saw the mountains, billows, rivers, stars, which I hadseen, and that ocean which I believe to be inwardly in my memory, and that, with the vast spaces between, as if I saw them abroad. Yet did not I by seeing draw them into myself, when with mine eyes I beheld them; nor are they themselves with me, but their images only. And I know by what sense of the body, each was impressed upon me.”
It is an interesting fact that Augustine noticed the possibility of illusions of memory. Certain rare phenomena—the so-called recollections of Pythagoras and others who were said to have remembered objects perceived in a former state ofexistence—he explains in a very modern fashion, except that he attributesthesebeliefs to the agency of evil spirits. “For we must not”, he says, “acquiesce in their story who assert that the Samian Pythagoras recollected some things of this kind, which he had experienced when he was previously here in another body; and otherstellyet of others, that they experienced something of the same sort in their minds. But it may be conjectured that these were untrue recollections, such as we commonly experience in sleep, when we fancy we remember, as though we had done or seen it, when we never did or saw at all;and that the minds of these persons, even though awake, were affected in this way at the suggestion of malicious and deceitful spirits, whose care it is to confirm, or to sow some false belief concerning the changes of souls, in order to deceive men.”[44]If they truly remembered such things, he argues, such phenomena would not be as rare; but many persons would experience the same.
Perhaps the most serious criticism of Augustine’s psychology of memory is that he entirely neglects the physiological side of the subject. He does noteven notice the relation of memory to states of health or disease, and of youth or age. In one place, however, he states that memory has its seat in one of the three ventricles of the brain, which is situated between that which is the seat of sensation and that which presidesoveroflocomotion, so that our movements may be coordinated.[45]
The criticism has also been made that Augustine seems to waver in his conception of memory, that he sometimes represents it as the source of all our intellectual activity comparing it among the other facultiesto the Father in the Trinity; that again he seems to limit this faculty to the work of preserving knowledge acquired empirically. Certainly in some passages he seems to make memory contain a kind of innate ideas that may be drawn forth by suggestion.[46]
But if Augustine is unsatisfactory in this, it must be remembered that he is not writing a psychology and that he was, as Ferraz calls him, a philosopher of transition. “He combats Plato’s doctrine of reminiscence, and prepares the way for the innate ideas of Descartes, without positively enough rejectingthe former, and without clearly enough admitting the latter.”[47]