into laws weakens our hold of special instances. Knowing the law of eclipses, we can calculate all past and all future instances, and we do not care to burden our memory with the historical record of eclipses. Our attention to the meaning of a word weakens our memory of its sound; attention to a person's character makes us less careful to remember his costume. While, therefore, it is a correct educational maxim that the memory must be trained on essential relations and causal processes, so as to strengthen the power of thought at the same time, yet there may be excess even in this direction. We find, accordingly, people whose memory of dates is so defective as to cause much waste of power; other persons are so forgetful of names as to be under constant embarrassment in conversation or in writing.

§ 127. Memory is therefore not a faculty of the soul which is to be desired on all accounts and cultivated always with assiduity. With the growth of culture of the higher powers it will occupy less and less place compared with the whole mind.

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Aristotle's profound insight into the nature of the soul and its powers deserves more study. In his De Anima that philosopher places memory with the fantasy, the activity of sense-perception, and the discursive intellect, as together constituting the passive reason " (Noûs walŋtiKós). He considers this part of the soul perishable or moribund. This thought of the perishability of such faculties in the onward career of the soul has quite another and deeper meaning than that usually attributed to it. Memory and sense-perception become less and less prominent factors in the human mind, and in some departments they already occupy a very inferior position. In arithmetic and geometry, for example, we deduce the special instance rather than observe it and memorize it. In each of the natural sciences an epoch of observation

closes with an exhaustive inventory of its details, and there follows an epoch in which the whole compass of details is organized into a system by means of a discovery of the laws and modes of action of the organic energy that produces the facts. Each fact is then seen in the perspective of its history, or of its genesis, and thus thoroughly explained; but with such explanation the scaffolding of original facts that were inventoried and systematized falls away, and all observation of new facts in the province becomes a mere verification of the known mode of action of the energy. Agassiz, having learned the principles of biological structure, recognises a new fish from one of its scales, and can tell with confidence its structure and conditions of living. It is not a matter of memory, but of direct insight. So Cuvier can see the whole animal in one of its bones, and Lyell see in each pebble its entire history. Goethe's allegorical Homunculus * symbolizes this new achievement in the scientific mind. The little living being confined in a bottle figures the final career of induction which has arrived at insight or intuition. Having exhaustively surveyed its limited field, each special science seizes upon the organizing principle and can predict facts or recognise and explain them at sight. When we can see each immediate fact in the perspective of its genesis or history, we have no use for memory which preserves for us facts and events isolated from their producing and deducing causes. Memory is moribund, and in province after province it is losing its importance. A fact-producing principle is seized and the facts are kept no longer in vast storehouses, for they can be deduced when wanted, or, if encountered in our experience, they can be explained and dismissed. We look beyond them to their causes, and let sense-perception and memory of such facts both drop. The relative amount of activity of

* See the second part of Faust. Homunculus stands for Winckelmann, who attained such knowledge of Greek art that he could give the rules that would enable one to recognise the god or goddess by a small part of the face.

sense-perception, of memory, and of mere reflection on accidental relations (vous TalηTIKós) continually diminishes, and the thinking on principles, causes, and organic processes (voûs TOINTIKÓS) increases.

CHAPTER XXV.

From Perception to Conception: each Object seen in its Class.

§ 128. WE have already seen (§§ 116 and 117) how the memory differs from recollection by making its survey include not only the particulars recalled by recollection, but also the entire process of recollection itself as a creative or producing unity of the mind. This phase of memory makes it a faculty that adds the general, the class, or species to the individual, and thus elevates perception to conception, and makes language possible.

(a) Nutrition implies foreign objects on which to exercise its energy. It manifests itself as a destruction of its environment and the extension of its power by conquest. If it could conquer all its environment it would become a totality; but then its activity would cease for want of food. The old Norse mythology conceived the tree Yggdrasil-the world-tree which had digested its environment in this way. (b) Sense-perception, on the other hand, implies impressions from foreign objects as the occasion of its activity of ideal reproduction. It can not

perceive without objects; hence its energy is always conditioned by energies independent of it. (c) Representation is reproduction without the presence of the senseobject; recollection and memory are forms of this. In the form of recollection the individual energy reproduces the activity of a past perception. The impression on the sense-organ is absent, and the freedom of the individual is manifested in this reproduction without the occasion which is furnished by the impression on the organism from without. The freedom to reproduce the image of an object that has been once perceived leads by easy steps to the perception of general notions; for, when the mind notices its mode of activity by which the former perception is reproduced or represented, it perceives, of course, its power of repeating the process, and notes that the same energy can produce an indefinite series of different images resembling one another. It is by this action of repre

sentation that the idea of the universal arises. It is a reflection on the conditions of recalling a former perception. The energy that can produce within itself the conditions of a former perception at pleasure, without the presence of the original object of perception, is an energy that is generic—that is, an energy that can produce the particular and repeat it to any extent. The universal or generic power can produce a class.

§ 129. With this consciousness of a generic energy manifested in the power of representation arises the recognition of generic energy manifested in the external world as the producer of the particular objects perceived, and each object is seen in its producing energy as one of an indefinite number produced by the continued existence of that energy. The consciousness of freedom of the Ego in this restricted province of representing or recalling former

sense-perceptions lies thus at the basis of the perception of objects as specimens of classes; hence representation or recollection, which is of special and individual objects, leads to the act of reflection by which the self as representing power is perceived, and with it the perception of the necessary generic character of the energy at the foundation of every impression upon our senses or at the foundation of every object perceived.

as

§ 130. At this point the activity of perception becomes Conception, or the perception of the general in the particular. The "this oak" is perceived an oak," or a specimen of the class oak. The class oak is conceived as an indefinite number of individual oaks, all produced by an energy which manifests itself in an organic process of assimilation and elimination, in which appear the stadia of acorn, sapling, tree, and crop of acorns-a continuous circle of reproduction of the species oak, a transformation of the one into the many-the one acorn becoming a crop of acorns, and then a forest of oaks. It is the energy, of course, that is the universal. It is not a conscious thought in the sense of being a special or abstract object of consciousness. But it is a part of the unity of the conceived object, and we may find it by analysis.