Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/174

160 F. H. BRADLEY: points ambiguously. For your present accidental mood may favour and support strongly some idea about the past, and this idea may in consequence strike you as natural and true. And again a mere imagination, if you repeat it, becomes in this way familiar, and itself thus creates the inner association which then offers itself as a witness to independent fact. And there is, once more here, no sure way of distinction between the false and the true, (iv.) Fixity of connexion is again not a trustworthy test. Where an idea is connected with a certain date strongly and fixedly in such a way that the opposite is maintained with difficulty, and where in addition this connexion is constantly recurrent, we tend to take it as memory. And where, besides this, the detail appears as a mere conjunction of coinciding particulars, we feel ourselves confirmed. But mere imagination is un- fortunately well known to present all these features, and it is impossible to find an infallible criterion or remedy. There are certain characters which usually are the result of that past fact to which the present idea refers. Foremost among these is that fixity and necessity of non-rational but integral detail which belongs to and points to an individual experi- ence ; and, when to this is added the sense of familiarity, then memory seldom fails to appear and is commonly justified. But the above characters can each, and all together, be pres- ent in a false imagination. The veracity of memory is not absolute, and memory itself is subject to the control of a higher criterion. Our justifica- tion for regarding memory as in general accurate is briefly this, that by taking such a course we are best able to order and harmonise our world. There is in the end no other actual or possible criterion of fact and truth, and the search for a final fact and for an absolute datum is everywhere the pursuit of a mere ignis fatuus. You may look for it in out- ward perception, or you may seek it in inward experience and intuition, but in each case you are misled by one and the same error in a different dress. This is a subject too large to be dealt with here as a whole, but I will notice before proceeding a recent instructive attempt to prove that memory is not fallible. The position taken by Prof. Ladd on this point seems far from clear. 1 I understand that for him it is a vital matter to show that memory is at least in part infallible, but for the rest his procedure seems obscure and even inconsistent 1 Philosophy of Mind, p. 133, foil. I have at present no acquaintance with Prof. Ladd's other works.