Belief in memory is implicit in the very rudiments of mind; mind and memory are indeed names for almost the same thing, since memory furnishes most of the resources of a mind at all developed, and nothing is ever in the mind but may reappear in memory, if the psyche can fall again for a moment into her old paces. Mind and memory alike imply cognisance taken of outlying things, or knowledge. When the things known are events within the past experience of the psyche, spontaneously imagined, knowledge is called memory; it is called mind or intelligence when they are past, present, or future events in the environment at large, no matter by what means they are suggested or reported. Memory itself must report facts or events in the natural world, if it is to be knowledge and to deserve the name of memory. An intuition by chance repeating an intuition that had occurred earlier would not be memory or knowledge of that earlier event. There must be belief in its previous occurrence, with some indication of its original locus.

Intuition without memory must be assumed to have existed in the beginning, but such intuition regards essence only. Not being directed by memory upon the past, nor by animal faith upon the future or upon external things, pure intuition exercises no sagacity, no transitive intelligence, and does not think. It is merely the light of awareness lending actuality to some essence. When identity and duration come to be attributed to this essence, memory begins to make its claims felt, although indirectly. When I call an essence identical I imply that I have considered it twice, and that I possess a true memory of my past intuition, since I know it presented this very essence. Similarly, when I call an essence the same, but without distinguishing my two intuitions of it, which may be continuous, I posit the truth of memory unawares; for this sensation of living on, of having lived up to the present, is a primary memory. It sets up a temporal perspective, believing firmly in its recessional character; parts of the specious present are interpreted as survivals of a receding present, a present that can never return, but the vision of which I have not wholly lost. The perspective is not taken to be specious only, but a true memorial of facts past and gone.

Memory deploys all the items of its inventory at some distance, yet sees them directly, by a present glance. It makes no difference to the directness of this knowledge how great the distance of the object may be in the direction of the past. So also in foresight: I foresee my death as directly as I do my dinner, not necessarily more vaguely, and far more certainly. Memory and prophecy do in time what perception does in space; here too the given essence is projected upon an object remote from the living psyche which is the organ of the intuition and of the projection. The object is indeed not remote from the mind, if by mind I understand the intellectual energy of memory, prophecy, or perception reaching to that object, and positing it there in intent; but it is remote from the psyche, from the material agent, from me here and now. A little less or a little more interval of time or space—and there is always an interval—does not render less ocular and immediate the description of a removed event by the essences it brings before me. I see a peewit in the sky as directly as I see the watch in my hand, and I hear his note as easily as I do the ticking of the watch against my ear. So I remember the Scotch kilt I wore when a child as directly as the umbrella I carried this morning. The difficulty in extending the range of knowledge is physical only; I may be near-sighted; and the mechanism of memory may break down, or may be choked with parasitic fancies as it grows old.

In memory it is sometimes possible to reproduce almost exactly some earlier scene or experience. If the psyche happens to run through the same process twice—and being material she is compacted of habits—she will twice have exactly the same intuition; but this precise repetition of the past, far from constituting a perfect memory, excludes memory. The sentiment of pastness, the receding perspective in which memory places its data, will be wanting; and this perfect recovery of experience will not be remembrance. Nor is any fulness or precision in the image of the past necessary to the truth of memory. The nerve of recollection lies elsewhere, in the projection of the given essence—which may be vague or purely verbal—to a precise point or nucleus of relations in the natural past. Memory is genuine if the events it designates actually took place, and conformed to the description, however brief and abstract, which I give of them. Pictorial fulness and emotional reversion to the past are not important, and they are found most often at unimportant points. Healthy memory excludes them, and for two reasons. The bodily reaction to the old environment is now hardly possible, and certainly not appropriate; and therefore, even if the neurogram in the psyche could spring again into perfect life, it would bring a dream into being, an interruption to life in the present, rather than a sober memory filling the present appropriately with a long perspective. The second reason is that the neurogram is likely to have been modified by the accidents of nutrition and waste intervening, so that the old movement cannot really be repeated, and the essence called up will not really be the original one. That it may seem to be the original, in its very life, is nothing to the purpose. How, if vivid, should it not seem so, when no other memory exists to control it? But if I can control it by circumstantial evidence, I usually find that this specious recovery of past experience is a cheap illusion. If the reversion to the past seems complete, it is not because the facts are remembered accurately, but because some subtle influence fills me with a sentiment wholly foreign to my present circumstances, and redolent of a remote past; and that dramatic shift seems to lift all the details of the picture out of the perspective of memory into the foreground of the present. It is the fancy that comes forward, producing a waking dream, not the memory that sinks back into an old experience. The scent of a cedar chest in which old finery is kept may carry me back vividly to my earliest childhood; but the images that now seem to live again will be creatures of my present sophisticated and literary fancy; I shall see them romantically, not with the eyes of a child. I may truly recover knowledge of long-forgotten facts, but I shall not re-enact a long-past experience. And what need is there? A miraculous identity may be felt emotionally even when the two descriptions of the identical thing differ in every sensible term, as happens in metaphors, in myths, in myself as body and as mind, in idolatry, or in the doctrine—which expresses a mystical experience—of transubstantiation. In such cases the vital reaction, the deeper readjustment of the psyche, to the two appearances is the same; therefore I feel that the thing appearing in the two ways is identical, that the one is really the other, however diverse the two sets of symbols may be.

I have already accepted the belief in memory; indeed, without accepting it I could not have taken the first step forward from the most speechless scepticism. But since such acceptance is an act of faith, and asserts transitive or realistic knowledge, I will pause to consider somewhat more explicitly what the cognitive claims of memory are, on which all human beliefs are reared.

The paradox of knowing the absent is posited in the past tenses of the verb; it is the paradox of knowledge itself, since intuition of essence is not properly called knowledge; it is imagination, since the only object present is then non-existent and the description of it, being creative, is infallible. The claim to knowledge everybody understands perfectly when he makes it, which he does whenever he perceives, remembers, or believes anything; but if we wish to paraphrase this claim reflectively, we may perhaps say that in it attention professes to fall on an object explicitly at a distance, being framed by other nearer objects (though at some distance themselves) upon which attention falls only virtually. If this foreground or frame were absent altogether, I should live in the pictured past thinking it present; memory would overleap its memorial office and become a dream. It would cease to be liable to error, being no longer a report about anything else; but it would become an idle entertainment, which a moralist might call an illusion, on the ground that its images were irrelevant to the practice of rational life, and its emotions wasted. But it would not misrepresent anything, since in ceasing to be a memory it would have abandoned all cognitive claims.

A frame or foreground is accordingly indispensable to the projection which renders a present image a vision of some past fact: I must stand here to point there. Yet if my present station were explicitly perceived, if the whole immediate datum were focussed equally in thought, the picture would seem flat and the perspective merely painted upon it, as upon a cheap drop-curtain in a theatre. It would destroy the claim and, if you like, the illusion of memory to remember that I am remembering; for then I should be considering myself only, and only the present, whereas in living remembrance I am self-forgetful, and live in the present thinking only of the past, and observe the past without supposing that I am living in it. My recollections, my souvenirs, are only essences which I read as I should the characters on this page, not viewing them contemplatively in their own category as forms present in their entirety, but accepting them readily (as in all knowledge) as messengers, as signs for existences of which they furnish but an imperfect description, for which I am perhaps hopeful of substituting a better view. In lapsing into the past I seem to myself to be entering a realm of shadows; and a chief part of my wakefulness, which prevents me from actually dreaming that I am living in that other world, is precisely this eagerness of mine to see better, to remember all, to recover the past as it really was; and the elusive and treacherous character of such images as come to me troubles me seriously, as a mist distorting and shutting off the truth. My heart, as it were, is fixed on that removed reality, and I know that my eyes see it but imperfectly. Yet if my heart had intuition now of what that reality once was, recollection would be superfluous, since I should possess all it could bring me before it brought it; and on the other hand, if my heart did not know the reality, how could I reject, criticise, or approve the images that professed to restore its forgotten aspects? Obviously what I am calling the heart, which is the psyche, is blind in herself: imagination is her only light, her only language; but she is a prior principle of choice and judgement and action in the dark; so that when the light shines in that darkness, she comprehends it, and feels at once whether the ray falls on the object towards which she was groping, or on some irrelevant thing. The psyche, in the case of memory, contains all the seeds, all the involutions and latent habits, which the past left there in passing; any one of these may be released freely, or only irritated and summoned to activity without being sufficiently fed, or only to be at once thwarted and contradicted; and the sentiment of this prosperous or mutilated rendering of experience, when memory proffers its images, enables the psyche to judge these images to be true or false, adequate or inadequate, without possessing any other images with which to compare them.

This felt imperfection of memory is no obstacle to the directness of such knowledge as it does afford. Memory, however vague, transports me to the intended scene; I walk by its wavering light through those ancient chambers; I see again (incorrectly, no doubt) what occurred there. But if many a detail once obvious is thereby lost or misplaced, memory may see the chief features of the past in a truer perspective than that in which experience placed them originally. The ghostliness of memory carries this compensation with it, comparable to the breadth of sympathy that compensates old age for the loss of vivaciousness; memory is a reconstruction, not a relapse. The view which the opened chest creates in me now of my family history may be truer than any I had when a child. My perceptions when a child were themselves descriptions, naïve, disjointed, limited. In reproducing my past perceptions, my dreaming memory does not regard those perceptions—perceptions being spiritual facts, can become objects of intent only. Memory regards the same objects (essences or things) which the past perceptions regarded. But the soil in which these intuitions now grow has been tilled and watered, and, even if a little exhausted, it may yield a fairer description of those ancient incidents than existed before, more voluminous, better knit, more knowing. Memory has fundamentally the same function as history and science—to review things more intelligently than they were ever viewed. Mind would never rise out of the most helpless animal routine if it could not forget in remembering, and could not substitute a moral perspective for the infinite flatness of physical experience. That much drops out is a blessing; that something creeps in, by way of idealisation, hyperbole, and legend, is not an unmixed evil. In spite of this admixture of fiction, memory, legend, and science achieve a true intellectual dominion over the flux of events; and they add a poetic life and rhythm of their own, like the senses.

This possibility of dominion proves that the images and the apperception involved in remembering are fresh images and a fresh apperception. It shows also that the later station in time of the act of remembering in no way annuls the directness of the knowledge involved, nor cuts it off from its object; on the contrary, the object being posited and chosen by the psyche before any images or any apperception arise, these are free to describe that object in any way they can, bringing all later resources of the mind to illustrate it, and thereby perhaps describing it far more truly than the senses revealed it when it was present.

Here an important detail has come into view which at first sight might seem paradoxical, but only because the paucity of language obliges us often to use the same word for very different things. Thus it seems natural to say that a man may remember his own experience, and can remember nothing else; and yet it is not his experience that he commonly remembers at all, but the usual object of his memory is the object of his former experience, the events or the situation in which his earlier experience occurred. Experience is intuition, it is discourse interspersed with shocks and recapitulated; but intuition, actual experience, is not an object of any possible intuition or experience, being, as I have said above, a spiritual fact. Its existence can be discovered only by moral imagination, and posited dramatically, as the experience proper to spirit under certain real or imaginary circumstances. And this is true of my own past or future, no less than of the experience of others. When I remember I do not look at my past experience, any more than when I think of a friend’s misfortunes I look at his thoughts. I imagine them; or rather I imagine something of my own manufacture, as if I were writing a novel, and I attribute this intuited experience to myself in the past, or to the other person. Naturally, I can impute only such feelings as my present psyche can evoke; and she, although creative, creates automatically and in accordance with patterns fixed by habit or instinct; so that it is true, in a loose way, that I can remember or conceive only what I have experienced; but this is not because my experience itself remains within me, and can be re-observed. Such a notion needs but to be made clear to be made ridiculous. Living intuition cannot be preserved; and even while it lives, it cannot be found. It is spiritual.

Recollection is accordingly incipient dreaming; it views the same objects as the experience did which it rehearses, since the memory arises by a renewal of the very process in the psyche by which that experience was created originally. The psyche, in so far as she is occupied with that dream, does not know that it is a memory, nor that its objects are remote and perhaps no longer exist; she posits them with all the confidence of action, as in any other dream. Yet in normal memory the illusion is controlled and corrected, and the experience actually given, with all its posited objects, is relegated to the past; because this time it is framed in another experience, with more obstinate objects and an environment to which the body is adjusted, incompatible with the remembered environment. Hence the shadowy, vaporous, unreal aspect of the remembered past: images chase one another through it, as they chase one another sometimes in a cinema, or as in a dream what was just now a white-capped wave may become a horse galloping. Meantime reason rides the storm of seething incipient fancies, anchored in the outer senses by the steady pull of the instincts which bind it to the present world.

Experience cannot be remembered, a perception cannot be perceived nor re-perceived. This fact explains both the directness of memory (since it regards the same objects, the same environment, as the old experience, and repeats the same emotions), and also the ghostliness of memory and of all imagination (since the beliefs and emotions evoked are irrelevant to the present world, and inhibited by peremptory present reactions).

There is a great difference conventionally between memory and fancy, between history and fiction, and the two things diverge widely in their physical significance, one regarding events in nature and the other imaginary scenes; nevertheless psychologically they are clearly akin. It is only by an ulterior control that we can distinguish which sort of fancy is memory and which sort of fiction is historical. This control, for the immediate past, is exercised by habit and sensation. The immediate past is continuous with the present; I believe that I remember, and do not merely imagine, the street in which I live, because I am ready to walk out into it confidently, and by raising my eyes can see it out of the window. It is an object continuous with the recurrent objects of my present faith. When the past is more remote, this control, while the same in principle, is less directly exercised; it is mainly the habit of memory that testifies to the truth of memory. I believe I remember, and do not merely imagine, what I have always said I remembered; just as we believe events to be historical and not invented, when historians have always repeated them. It is consequently very easy for a fiction, once incorporated in what, because of our practical habits, we regard as real events, to pass for a fact for ever. Autobiographies and religions (even when not systematically recast by the fancy, as they usually are) contain many such involuntary confusions. Vice versa, a lively fiction spontaneously takes the form of a history or a memory. Although no junction with genuine memory or history may be attempted in Robinson Crusoe at the beginning or at the end, many a real fact may be woven into the narrative, to add to its verisimilitude, and absorb, as it were, the fancied details into the romantic medley of things commonly believed. “Once upon a time,” says the story-teller, in order vaguely to graft his imaginary events on to the tree of memory; and in the Thousand and One Nights we are transported to one of the cities amongst cities, or to an island amongst the isles of the sea; whereby the fiction grows more arresting, or the real world more marvellous and large.

Criticism of memory and history is a ticklish and often a comic matter, because only fancy can be employed to do it; and we judge the authority of records and the reports of our past experience by the criterion of what, at the present moment, can exercise a decided suasion over our belief, and create a living illusion. But the principle by which we trust memory at all is always the same, and deeply paradoxical. How can a flux be observed at all? If flux there be, the earlier part is gone when the latter part appears: how then can the relation, the passage, be observed? And where is the observation? If it occupies each instant in turn, how can it bridge them? If it stands outside, how can it touch any of them? In any case the observation would seem to be out of the flux which it imagines, but does not undergo: for if its being is instantaneous, there is no flux in it; and if it is comprehensive, and contemporary with all the instants surveyed, again it endures no change. Indeed, analytically, it is obvious that a sense of change, falling necessarily under a unity of apperception, transcends that change, however changeful may be the conditions of its own genesis: mind, by its very character as mind, is timeless. Is time, then, merely a picture of time, and can it be nothing else? And is flux, which is an essential quality of existence, only a mere appearance, and essentially incapable of existing in fact?

There is danger here of an enormous illusion, into which I think the most redoubtable metaphysicians have fallen. We must admit that spirit is not in time, that the perception of flux (or of anything else) is not a flux, but a synthetic glance and a single intuition of relation, of form, of quality. The seen is everywhere a universal, the seeing is everywhere supernatural. But this admission is far from involving a denial of flux—a denial, that is, of the deliverance of this very spirit to which we are assigning such pompous prerogatives. The one prerogative which we must assume spirit to possess—because we claim it in exercising spirit at all—is that it understands, that it tells truly something about something. Its own conditions of being, that it must be immaterial, timeless, synthetic, intuitive, do not preclude it, if it is truly intelligent, from revealing things differently constituted from itself: much less can it prevent these non-spiritual things from existing. What madness is this, because we may at last discern the spirituality of spirit, to deny that there could ever have been anything for spirit to discern? Why stultify the very faculty we are discovering that we possess? Why tumble in this way head over heels from our little eminence, and reduce ourselves to speechlessness in wonder at our capacity to speak? This supernatural status and super-temporal scope of spirit are not prerogatives; they are deprivations; they are sacrificial conditions, from the point of view of natural existence, to which any faculty must submit, if it is to understand. Of course understanding is itself an achievement (though not all philosophers esteem it highly), but it must be bought at a price: at the price of escaping into a fourth dimension, of not being that which we understand. So when the flux, in its rumble and perpetual superposition of movements, remembers that it flows, it is not arrested materially; but the sense that what flows through it at this instant has come from afar, that it has taken a fresh shape, and is hurrying to new transformations, has itself eluded that fate: for this sense, as distinguished from the psyche that exercises it, is tangential to the flux it surveys, neither instantaneous nor prolonged, but simply intelligent. How far into the past or future its glance may reach, is a matter of accident, and of the range of adjustments at that moment in the psyche. But spirit is virtually omniscient: barriers of space and time do not shut it in; they are but the boundary-stones of field and field in its landscape. It is ready to survey all time and all existence if, by establishing some electric connection with its seat, time and existence will consent to report themselves to it. For spirit has no interests, no curiosity, no animal impatience; and as it arises only when and where nature calls it forth, so it surveys only what nature happens to spread before it.