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The process of remembering will consist of calling up images of my breakfast, which will come to me with a feeling of belief such as distinguishes memory-images from mere imagination-images. Or sometimes words may come without the intermediary of images; but in this case equally the feeling of belief is essential.
In the field of "pure" perception, that is to say, perception unadulterated by the addition of memory-images, there can arise no image without an object. This is why the surface of the body, which forms the common limit of the external and internal, is the only portion of space which is both perceived and felt. Consider the system of images which we term the "external world."
It has even been maintained that the different feelings and perceptions which are gradually acquired can be apportioned among the individual cells of the brain in which they are localised, and the thought-processes, the associations of percepts, the origin of consecutive ideas, the rapid and easy recalling of memory-images, and the process of voluntary control, of instincts, can be explained as due to the “gradual laying down of nerve-paths” between the different centres and areas of localisation in the brain.
These experiences are like photographic negatives, until language develops them and brings out the memory-images. September 4, 1887. Helen had a letter this morning from her uncle, Doctor Keller. He invited her to come to see him at Hot Springs. The name Hot Springs interested her, and she asked many questions about it. She knows about cold springs.
There is no reason why memory-images, accompanied by that very simple belief-feeling which we decided to be the essence of memory, should not have occurred before language arose; indeed, it would be rash to assert positively that memory of this sort does not occur among the higher animals.
The human capacity for science is dependent on the faculty of speech; words are conventional signs to facilitate the retention and communication of ideas. As the memory-images denoted by words are weaker, fainter, and less clearly discriminated than the original sensations, it comes to pass that a number of similar ideas of memory receive a common name.
If, instead of a perception impregnated with memory-images, nothing survived from the past, then we should have "pure" perception, not coloured by anything in the individual's past history, and so a kind of impersonal perception.
Let us omit from our consideration, for the present, the memories in which words replace images. These are always, I think, really habit-memories, the memories that use images being the typical true memories. Memory-images and imagination-images do not differ in their intrinsic qualities, so far as we can discover.
I come now to the other characteristic which memory-images must have in order to account for our knowledge of the past. They must have some characteristic which makes us regard them as referring to more or less remote portions of the past.
There are two distinct questions to be asked: What causes us to say that a thing occurs? What are we feeling when we say this? As to the first question, in the crude use of the word, which is what concerns us, memory-images would not be said to occur; they would not be noticed in themselves, but merely used as signs of the past event.
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