images. But this correspondence explains — so far as it explains anything — only the facts of recurrence. How, now, about those other facts, — the facts, namely, that the thing or event imaged is "expressly referred to the past" and the fact that it is "dated in my past"? These facts are not satisfactorily explained, to my thinking, when you simply say : Let us "pool" the mystery, and just tumble into the "pool" the word "consciousness," as a kind of insignificant surplusage to so-called "organic" or "cerebral" memory. Nay: for it is precisely these, and no other, psychic mysteries — the mysteries of the reference of a present state to a past that is my past — for which we are seeking an explanation.
And if you will only give Professor James time enough, and take the pains to piece together what he admits and claims in other connections, and not hold him strictly to his favorite topic of cerebral psychology, and will welcome certain "shame-faced" metaphysical postulates, you will find him giving a very fair account of this special problem of memory. Here I will venture to bring together some of the numerous passages in which sidelights are thrown on this problem. "There are categories," says he (I, p. 147, note), "common to the two worlds. Not only temporal succession, but such attributes as intensity, volume, simplicity or complication, smooth or impeded change, rest or agitation, are habitually predicated of both physical facts and mental facts. Where such analogies obtain the things do have something in common." Yes: but it is also implied that there are categories which are not common to the two worlds. What analogy, what thing in common, is there between the fact of the recurrence of an analogous brain-state and the fact, not simply that the corresponding mental state recurs, but that I refer this present state to a past fact, and set it in the past as my past?
How, moreover, shall a writer object to speaking of some psychic synthesis as involved in memory, who has himself maintained (p. 158): "All the combinations which we actually know are effects, wrought by the units said to be combined, upon some entity other than themselves." "No possible number of
