Philosophy · Bertrand Russell
IMAGINATION AND MEMORY
The first point is one which seems so obvious that I should be ashamed to mention it, but for the fact that many distinguished philosophers think otherwise. The point is this: whatever may be happening now, the event remembered is _not_ happening. Memory is often spoken of as if it involved the actual persistence of the past which is remembered; Bergson, _e.g._ speaks of the interpenetration of the present by the past. This is mere mythology; the event which occurs when I remember is quite different from the event remembered. People who are starving can remember their last meal, but the recollection does not appease their hunger. There is no mystic survival of the past when we remember; merely a new event having a certain relation to the old one. What this relation is, we shall consider presently.
It is quite clear that images are not enough to constitute recollection, even when they are accurate copies of a past occurrence. One may, in a dream, live over again a past experience; while one is dreaming, one does not seem to be recalling a previous occurrence, but living through a fresh experience. We cannot be said to be remembering, in the strict sense, unless we have a belief referring to the past. Images which, like those in dreams, feel as if they were sensations, do not constitute recollection. There must be some feeling which makes us refer the images to a past prototype. Perhaps familiarity is enough to cause us to do so. And perhaps this also explains the experience of trying to remember something and feeling that we are not remembering it right. Parts of a complex image may feel more familiar than other parts, and we then feel more confidence in the correctness of the familiar parts than in that of the others. The conviction that the image we are forming of a past event is wrong might _seem_ to imply that we must be knowing the past otherwise than by images, but I do not think this conclusion is really warranted, since degrees of familiarity in images suffice to explain this experience.
As for the trustworthiness of memory, there are two things to be said. Taken as a whole, memory is one of the independent sources of our knowledge; that is to say, there is no way of arriving at the things we know through memory by any argument wholly derived from things known otherwise. But no single memory is obliged to stand alone, because it fits, or does not fit, into a system of knowledge about the past based upon the sum-total of memories. When what is remembered is a perception by one or more of the public senses, other people may corroborate it. Even when it is private, it may be confirmed by other evidence. You may remember that you had a toothache yesterday, and that you saw the dentist to-day; the latter fact may be confirmed by an entry in your diary. All these make a consistent whole, and each increases the likelihood of the other. Thus we can test the truth of any particular recollection, though not of memory as a whole. To say that we cannot test the truth of memory as a whole is not to give a reason for doubting it, but merely to say that it is an independent source of knowledge, not wholly replaceable by other sources. We know that our memory is fallible, but we have no reason to distrust it on the whole after sufficient care in verification has been taken.
The causation of particular acts of recollection seems to be wholly associative. Something in the present is very like something in the past, and calls up the context of the past occurrence in the shape of images or words; when attention falls upon this context, we believe that it occurred in the past, not as mere images, and we then have an act of recollection. There are many difficult problems connected with memory which I have not discussed, because they have an interest which is more purely psychological than philosophical. It is memory as a source of knowledge that specially concerns the philosopher.
Ideas discussed in this chapter
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