ANALYSIS OF THE DATA OF MEMORY.

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In addition to the

concepts formed from the immediate data of consciousness, con

cepts of being, existence, subject, substance, agent, body,

extension, mind, action, state, process, accident, etc., we

have furnished by memory the data for our concepts of self-

identity, duration, change, succession, time, etc. These are

the concepts we utilize in interpreting the immediate data of

memory. Now we have adequate objective evidence for the

following judgments concerning memory, its data, and their

implications ; and these judgments therefore are vindicated by

reflection as objectively valid and certainly true :

(rt) My consciousness reveals some of its contents &s familiar,

as repetitions : this character being peculiar to, and inseparable

from, their present appearance in my consciousness. Now,

when I formulate intellectually what is already implicit in

such data, by the explicit judgments, "/ experienced these

data before : they occurred to me in the past : they are events of

my past experience, recalled and recognized by me as such? my

intellect is determined to such judgments by the clearest ob

jective evidence of the very nature itself of my present conscious

state. Therefore such judgments are objectively true ; and

their truth is being constantly verified experimentally by their

fitting in with the train of my actual experiences. 1

1 The exact location of some remembered events in the time series of past

experiences is given immediately; others are located only indirectly and by

reasoning from the present and from already located events. Here there is room

for error. Moreover, memory has its limits, it does not retain or recall all past

experiences, but comparatively few. Nor is it infallible, any more than intellect

itself; except in regard to its immediate data, as intellect is in regard to im

mediately evident judgments. Psychology deals with the mistakes and deceptions

SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND MEMORY 13

(fr) Since my " remembered " experiences reveal themselves

in the concrete as having been actually mine in the past, and as

now actually reproduced in my present conscious act of remember

ing, there is manifestly revealed to me in this act the concrete dura

tion of my own self -identical existence as abiding subject and agent

of these successive conscious states and activities. I thus form

the spontaneous judgment that " I continue in existence, preserving

my substantial, personal self-identity throughout the succession of

real but accidental changes to which this my real existence is

subject 1 1 ; and my certitude of the truth of this spontaneous

judgment is confirmed by reflection. For just as I see that

at the present moment of consciousness I cannot be merely a

bundle or collection of states or processes (without any sub

stantial subject or agent), but that I am concrete subject and

agent of these states and processes, so I see, in and through my

present, conscious act of remembering, that I am the same self-

identical subject who experienced the past datum, and who now

reproduce and recognize it as previously experienced.

In other words, just as the attempts of sensists and positiv-

ists, such as Locke, Hume, Mill, Taine, etc., to explain consciousness

(and knowledge generally) without admitting a real substance, ends

in their substantializing accidents (or consciousness itself"), so their

attempts to explain memory, while denying the real permanence

of the self or subject and holding the latter to be a mere stream

or series of conscious states, ends in such fantastic theories of

personal identity as that of Professor James : that the present

thought (which is the only thinker), or the present conscious

state, " appropriates " the content of the immediately preceding

state and " transmits" this p/us its own content to the next suc

ceeding one, a theory the unsufficiency of which its propounder

himself admits by recognizing the necessity of postulating some-

of memory. The theses in the text are in no way influenced by the possibility of

such deceptions.

1 The concept of substance, which I thus find realized in my own being, is not

the fanciful notion of an absolutely immutable, hidden, unknowable core or sub

strate of separate, ever-flowing, evanescent phenomena or accidents, a fiction

falsely attributed to scholastics by modern sensists and positivists (cf. Ontology,

64). It is the notion of a real mode of being which does not inhere in other being

for its reality; a mode of being the reality and nature of which are revealed in and

through its changing states or accidents ; which is subject to (accidental) change

and yet persists really (substantially) the same throughout the change (ibid., 63,

80, pp. 302-3).

2 Cf. Ontology, 61, 75-

1 4 THEOR Y OF KNO W LEDGE

thing "more than the bare fact of the co-existence of a passing

thought with a passing brain-state "- 1

in consciousness and memory, is revealed and intellectually in

terpreted as a really existing being which persists self-identical

throughout a succession of real states, constituting real change, I

have in these concrete data the objective and real contents of

my concepts of duration, succession, and time. Since through con

sciousness and memory I am aware of myself as undergoing real

change, and of a real succession in my conscious states, I am

aware in the concrete of my own existence as having real and

concrete time duration. This concrete awareness of succession may

be described as an internal perception of time. My intellect,

apprehending from this datum successive duration in the abstract,

forms the abstract concept of time. Thus the concept of time is

objectively real, having its real foundation in the succession in

volved in real change, just as we shall see the concept of space

to be likewise objectively real, having its real foundation in the

perceived real extension of bodies.

Time, then, is not a substantive reality, sui generis, distinct

from real change : its reality is the reality of change, but it is

this reality endowed by intellect with the logical features of

abstractness and universality, and the logical relation of measur

ing the amount of change : it is, in other words, an ens rationis

cum fundamento in re." Neither is time, therefore, on the other

hand a mere "ens rationis," a mere subjective, a priori form of

internal cognition or consciousness, as Kant would have it. The

utter untenability of Kant s doctrine on time will be shown

below (134).

Kant would, of course, urge against all the intellectual interpretations of

the data of consciousness and memory, which we have been vindicating in the

present chapter, the general charge that these interpretations are reached

through concepts, and that concepts can reveal nothing about the reality or

real nature of the self or Ego. Our reply is that they are indeed reached

through concepts, and embodied in judgments, but that we have already

vindicated, against his theory, the real objectivity of conception and judg

ment.

1 Principles of Psychology, i., p. 346, apud MAKER, Psychology, p. 483. Cf.

Ontology, 75, pp. 276-84. For further developments of the doctrines of substance,

person, personal identity, permanence of the Ego, time duration, etc., and refutations

of sensist theories, cf. Ontology, chaps, viii. and ix., chap, xi., 85, 86; MAKER, op.

cit., chap. xxii.

2 Cf. Ontology, 85, p. 324.

SELF-CONSCIO USNESS AND MEMOR Y 1 5