Provision

they passed before the actual view. Such rehearsal in the mind after the reality has passed, is a great means of impressing the events of our personal experience. The degree of emotional interest attaching to them displays its efficacy in bringing about their more or less frequent recal. What is indifferent passes by and is never dwelt upon afterwards; what has excited us at the time excites us in the remembrance, and secures a large space in our ideal meditations. is thus made for consolidating in the memory a train of circumstances that do not admit of being repeated in the view. We are thereby enabled to recal in after years all the leading transactions that are now going on around us; we can describe the incidents connected with our family, our village or city, our school, our places of business, recreation, or worship; we can live over again, in minute detail, the scenes that had an intense pleasurable or painful interest at the time.

77. The transactions that we know by hearsay, or the narrative of others, impress themselves somewhat differently. We have no longer the actual scenes presented to our vision. They are represented by words, and the recollection is modified by the circumstances affecting verbal adhesion. If we make the extreme supposition that the hearer of a narrative has his mind carried at once to the scenes and events themselves, and is able to realize them with an almost living reality, the case is not different from the foregoing; the words are made use of to hoist the scenes, and then drop away. But there are few people that have this vivid power of conceiving the realities of narrated transactions. In general, the verbal succession of the narrative is itself a medium of holding together the events contained in it, and the recollection is a mixture of adhesions, pictorial and verbal.

Written history may therefore be retained by a good verbal memory. Where the thread of pictured events has snapped, the thread of verbal succession in the printed page may chance to be adherent; between the two, the power of recollection on the whole is irregularly divided.

OUR PAST LIFE.

78. The train of our past existence is made coherent in the mind through contiguity, and can be recalled with more or less minuteness according to the strength of the adhesion. In any subject that is complicated with a multitude of details, only a few prominent features usually adhere; as, for example, the parts of a landscape, or the incidents of a history; and such is the case with the great complex current of each one's individual existence.

This current is made up of all the elements contained in the foregoing heads of this chapter. It is made up of all our actions, all our sensations, emotions, volitions, in the order of their occurrence. It is the track described by each individual through the world during his sojourn therein; it comprises all that he has done and all that he has been impressed with.

Under the previous head I have spoken of the stream of history, or the current of events passing before the eyes of a spectator supposed to be passive. This spectatorship of what is going on about us does not express the whole current of our remembered existence; there is wanting the series of our own doings and transactions. When what we have done is added to what we have seen and felt, the history of self is complete.

The peculiar feature of the present case, therefore, is the remembrance of our own actions according as they happened. We have to determine the nature of the bond that associates things done by us, and not simply seen.

79. In the first place, a vast number of our movements consist in changing the spectacle about us, or in producing a series of appearances to the eye, or effects on the senses in general. Thus when we walk out, we bring before our eyes a stream of houses, shops, streets, fields, and the impression of the walk, the coherent trace that it leaves in the brain, is in part at least pictorial, just as if we stood still and saw the scenes shifted in the same order. So our work often consists in producing changes seen and remembered as sensible appear

ances. The ploughman's active day is summed up in the furrowed field that is pictured in his mind in the evening retrospect. The soldier in a field-day remembers less his own exertions than the movements of the collective battalions as they took place before his eyes. Hence it is that remembered actions may be to a great extent remembered appearances, and so far the case now in hand is in noways different from the preceding.

It is evident, however, that there must be a remembrance. of actions by themselves as well as of the changes that they bring before the view. We do in fact have a recollection of our own active states as such; we can describe the movements made by us, the feelings of pleasant exercise, laborious exertion, or reposing fatigue, that we have successively gone through in a given day, week, or month.

This takes us back to what was advanced at the commencement of the present chapter on the Ideas of movement and action. I endeavoured to show that these are constituted by re-actuating the circles of movement, but so as to come short of the full stimulus required by the action itself; the remembrance of striking a blow is in reality all but to repeat the act, the restraining of the full display being sometimes a matter of difficulty. Now successive actions cohere both as actions and as ideas; we may either perform the actions outright, or stop short at the mere idea or vestige of the action. Much of our life is spent in going over remembered and ideal actions; and when we recover a work done by us, merely as a matter of history and not for the purpose of doing the work again, the vestige or idea of the different steps is what passes along the mental system. These vestiges of movements executed are as really and truly mental possessions or ideas as the remembered pictures of the external world through the eye. We can revive one or other in the ideal form; in truth our recollections are usually a mixture of the two, inasmuch as our sensations are all unavoidably mixed up with movements.

Now in recalling a series of movements, as for instance a dance, simply for our own gratification, because of the agreeable feelings that they gave in the reality, we do nothing

REMEMBRANCE OF OUR OWN ACTIONS.

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but revive those vestiges or diminished currents that suffice for the purpose of a recollection. This is to live our history over again in idea. But when we have acquired the power of naming all the various movements in the succession, the ideas, as they successively repossess the various organs, suggest the names of the different steps, and we can then narrate the whole in language. It is this power of narrating that we usually term the recollection of an event, and that constitutes history. With the power of language that belongs to human beings, it happens that our recollections of what we have gone through do not occur as pure ideas of the actions and scenes themselves, but as ideas mixed up with verbal descriptions, which last are constantly disposed to intrude themselves into our recollections, even when these are not communicated to any one.

The firm adhesion of the ideas or vestiges of our active movements is a case of muscular contiguity, like the adhesion of the actions themselves in acquiring mechanical habits. I cannot find any other law for the association of ideas of movements than for actual movements. I have already endeavoured to discuss the circumstances favourable to the adhesion of muscular trains, and these would, I conceive, hold in the present case also. People that have a facility in acquiring mechanical habits would have an equal facility in remembering the steps of any performance that they had gone through. The greater instance implies the less; the adhesion of the movements in full involves the adhesion of the currents that stop short of movement.

The case is altered, as above remarked, by the intrusion of language or expression; in so far as we rely upon this, our remembrance will be easy or difficult according as our adhe siveness for language is strong or feeble. This is not the only instance of impressions retained by the help of some foreign machinery more adhesive than themselves. We have seen the same thing in the retention of the sensations of the inferior senses.

80. Our past life may, therefore, be conceived as a vast stream of spectacle, action, emotion, volition, desire, inter

mingled and complicated in every way, and rendered adherent by its unbroken continuity. It being impossible to associate all the details, so as to recover them at pleasure, we find in experience that only the more impressive facts remain strung together in recollection. All the larger epochs and stirring incidents readily flow in upon our memory, when we go back to some early starting point; while the minor events fail to appear on the simple thread of sequence in time, and are recalled only by the presence of other circumstances that serve to link them with the present. Our habits of recalling the past generally lead us to associate events in new connexions, as when a person recites the history of his early education, selecting out of the miscellaneous stream the incidents that relate to this one point. Our individual history becomes thus broken up into sections and partial narratives; and to recover the total current, we should find it requisite to collect these into one great combination upon the thread of strict succession in order of time.

81. I have thus presented a series of examples of the working of the adhesive force, termed the principle of Association by Contiguity. As the subject proceeds there will be other opportunities of adding to the illustration. The special branch of Moral acquisitions, or Habits, would best find a place in a Treatise on Volition. There now only remains some general observations on the nature of this great adhesive force.

I would first remark the difficulty there is in obtaining a measure of the absolute force of contiguous adhesiveness in an individual character. The modifying circumstances interfere so as to perplex the question. There are doubtless local and special acquirements, as music, or the verbal memory, both which repose in a great measure on the structure of the organ of hearing, and not exclusively on the general adhesiveness of the brain. The only measure that I can propose for this general adhesiveness is the multitude, variety, and facility of acquisitions in general,—the ease of acquiring any kind of bent, habit, or faculty that may be entered on,-the distinction acquired as a learner, in all departments of knowledge, busi