Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/594

WHY DO WE BEMEMBEE FOEWAEDS AND NOT BACKWAEDS ? 581 increase or dragged captive to our decay, but in either case going to meet fresh experiences. Or why does Time run backward from the future ? Because we do not go back, but still hold our own against change, and force the incoming to minister to our constant identity. And Time goes backward once more when our life slips backward with it, when what we are appears a stone that marks the growing space beyond which our self for ever recedes from us upon the ebb. But again we may be stationary through some blessed hour, anchored in some quiet backwater, a still eddy beside the torrent of things, out of the world, so we feel it. Here, if events hurry forward to the future, or are whirled backward into the abyss, it is all one to us, since we ourselves are. But we are stationary once more, when all we have fails to interest and when the new seems merely old. It all (we feel) makes no real difference, is all the same thing over again ; ice do not move ; and, if events go forward still as they did before, or if, on the other hand, it is nothing new that is coming from the future is a question that is indifferent. Time has here again hardly a direction. Let us turn now to our problem about the order of reproduc- tion. We have seen that the direction of mere Time does not help us even to ask the question rightly. And we can see now better how to ask it. Why is our memory directed towards our incoming sensations, and towards the side from which change comes? It is so (we may say, in the first place), because our thoughts in general naturally take this road. And why they take it appears to me almost obvious. The answer, in a word, is practical necessity. Life being a process of decay and of continual repair and a struggle throughout against dangers, our thoughts, if we are to live, must mainly go the way of antici- pation. This, when we attend to it, seems quite evident and a mere commonplace. In a creature placed low down in the psychical scale no such thing as memory can even exist. And, though to say that its thoughts are occupied with the future would be barbarous psychologically, still the ideal qualifications of its sensations correspond in the main to future changes of its state by approaching sensation and action. And, if this were not so in the main, of course the creature would be destroyed. And hence, when after a long time memory is developed, it naturally takes the habitual mental direction. We are like a boat anchored on a tide, a boat that ceaselessly decays, and that, to maintain itself, must gather material from what comes floating down ; and not only this, for there sweep down impending masses which threaten it. Now if, in order to gather material and to ward off destruction, we turned habitually towards the wrong end of our vessel, how, if such a thing were possible, could it fail to make an end of us. And then, when after a time we get strength to rest, and to recall some great benefit secured or great danger avoided, what is more natural than that still our thought