Diseases Of Memory Diseases Of The Will And Diseases Of Personality Classic Reprint PDF Download

Excerpt from Diseases of Memory, Diseases of the Will, and Diseases of Personality Thus understood, our study involves a general physiology and psychology of memory, and at the same time its pathology. The disorders and diseases of this faculty, when classified and interpreted, are no longer an assemblage of curious facts and amusing anecdotes to be mentioned only incidentally: on the contrary, they are seen to be subject to certain laws which constitute the very groundwork of memory and which reveal its mechanism. In the common acceptation of the word, memory includes three things, viz.: the retention of certain states; their reproduction; their localization in the past. This, however, is only one kind of memory, and it may be designated perfect. These three elements are of unequal value: the first two are necessary, indispensable; the third, that which, in the language of the schools, i, called "recollection," gives completeness to memory, but does not constitute it. Do away with the first two, and memory is abolished: suppress the third, and memory ceases to exist for itself, without ceasing to exist in itself. Hence this third element, which is purely psychological, appears as superadded to the others: they are permanent; it is instable, appearing and disappearing; it represents what consciousness may claim as its own in the fact of memory, and nothing more. If we study memory as it has been studied down to our time, as a "faculty of the soul," with the aid of the sensus intimus (consciousness) alone, we must of necessity recognize in this perfect and conscious phase all that there is in memory; nevertheless that were, under the influence of a faulty method, to take a part for the whole, or rather the species for the genus. Some authors of our day - Huxley, Clifford, Maudsley, and others, - by maintaining that consciousness is only the accompaniment of some nervous processes, and that it is as incapable of reacting upon them as is a shadow of reacting on the footsteps of the wayfarer that it accompanies, have opened the way for the new theory which is here essayed. Let us set aside for the moment the psychic element, which will be considered later; let us reduce the problem to its simplest terms, and see how, quite apart from consciousness, a new state is implanted in the organism, how it is retained, and how reproduced: in other words, how, apart from consciousness, a fact of memory has its rise. Before we come to organic memory itself, we must note certain phenomena that have sometimes been compared to it. Authors have found analogues of memory in the inorganic world, and particularly "in the property possessed by light-vibrations, whereby they may be stored up on a sheet of paper, and there persist, for a longer or shorter time, in the state of latent vibrations, ready to reappear at the summons of a developing agent. Engravings exposed to the sun's rays and then kept in a dark place, can months afterward, by the aid of appropriate reagents, reveal persistent traces of the photographic action of the sun upon their surface." Lay a key upon a sheet of white paper, and expose the two to the direct rays of the sun; then lay the paper away in a drawer, and years afterward the spectral image of the key will be visible. In our opinion these and other like facts bear too remote an analogy to memory to merit being cited. In them we find the first condition of all recollection, namely, the retention of the impression, but that is all we find, for here the reproduction of the impression is in such a degree passive, and dependent on the intervention of an outside agency, that it bears no resemblance to the natural reproduction of memory. Furthermore, with regard to the matter before us, we must never forget that we have to do with the laws of life, not with physical laws, and that the foundations of memory must be sought in the properties of organized matter and not elsewhere. It will be seen later that...