Page:Russell - The Problems of Philosophy, 1912.djvu/184

Another class of intuitive judgments, analogous to those of sense and yet quite distinct from them, are judgments of memory. There is some danger of confusion as to the nature of memory, owing to the fact that memory of an object is apt to be accompanied by an image of the object, and yet the image cannot be what constitutes memory. This is easily seen by merely noticing that the image is in the present, whereas what is remembered is known to be in the past. Moreover, we are certainly able to some extent to compare our image with the object remembered, so that we often know, within somewhat wide limits, how far our image is accurate; but this would be impossible, unless the object, as opposed to the image, were in some way before the mind. Thus the essence of memory is not constituted by the image, but by having immediately before the mind an object which is recognised as past. But for the fact of memory in this sense, we should not know that there ever was a past at all, nor should we be able to understand the word "past," any more than