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Updated: June 14, 2025
Some of them will concern us later, but for the present it is the fundamental character of mnemic phenomena that is in question. It is, in fact, hypothetical, invoked for theoretical uses, and not an outcome of direct observation.
Images also differ from sensations as regards their effects. Sensations, as a rule, have both physical and mental effects. Images, on the contrary, though they MAY produce bodily movements, do so according to mnemic laws, not according to the laws of physics. All their effects, of whatever nature, follow mnemic laws.
And the definition of perspectives and biographies, though it does not yet yield anything that would be commonly called "mental," is presupposed in mental phenomena, for example in mnemic causation: the causal unit in mnemic causation, which gives rise to Semon's engram, is the whole of one perspective not of any perspective, but of a perspective in a place where there is nervous tissue, or at any rate living tissue of some sort.
The argument from the existence of mnemic phenomena in physiology must therefore be allowed a certain weight against the hypothesis that mnemic causation is ultimate.
We should, therefore, be compelled to allow the intrusion of mnemic causation, if admitted at all, into non-psychological regions, which ought, one feels, to be subject only to causation of the ordinary physical sort.
Your image of his hands is due to the many times that you have heard similar sounds and at the same time seen the player's hands on the piano. When habit and past experience play this part, we are in the region of mnemic as opposed to ordinary physical causation.
This emotion would be dependent upon past experience, and would therefore be a mnemic phenomenon according to the definition. From time to time we remember things that have happened to us, because something in the present reminds us of them. Exactly the same present fact would not call up the same memory if our past experience had been different. Thus our remembering is caused by
If there is to be parallelism, it is easy to prove by mathematical logic that the causation in physical and psychical matters must be of the same sort, and it is impossible that mnemic causation should exist in psychology but not in physics.
If we are pure materialists and imagine every memory in our possession as something stamped, in some wholly incomprehensible manner, on some cell of our brain and looked at there, by some wholly inconceivable agency, when we sit down to think of past days, then we must look on the germ, under the "mnemic" or memory theory as consisting of fragments each of them impressed with the "memory" of some particular organ or feature of the body, and lo! we find ourselves back again in micromerism.
Neither the particulate nor the chemical theories help us here. The mnemic would, but it has its initial and insuperable difficulty, pointed out in another article in this volume, that, as you must have an experience before you can remember it, it in no way accounts for the first operation of arrangement.
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