We have now arrived at the principal question, for which all that has hitherto been said was only a preparation: Is there such a thing as a real revival of impressions? Although most psychologists do not put this question at all, or only treat it in a cursory manner, the majority of answers are certainly in the negative. It is maintained that we remember the conditions and circumstances of an emotional occurrence, but not the emotional state itself.
I feel obliged completely to reject this theory, which would never have been maintained if the subject had not been treated _a priori_, in an offhand manner, without sufficient observations. A closer study, supported by the facts which I have adduced, and others which will follow, shows that there are two quite distinct cases. Some people have a _false_ or _abstract_ memory for feelings, others a _true_ or _concrete_ one. In the former the image is scarcely revived, or not at all; in others it is revived in great part, or totally. In order the better to explain the difference between these two forms of memory, let us examine the constituent elements and the mechanism of each separately.
1. The _false_ or _abstract_ memory of feeling consists in the representation of an occurrence, _plus_ an affective characteristic—I do not say an affective state. This is certainly the most frequent form. What remains of the small incidents of a long journey but the recollection of the places where they happened, the details, and the fact that they _were once_ disagreeable. What remains of a vanished love-affair but the impression of a person, of attentions paid to her, of adventures, and, besides, the recollection that this _was once_ happiness? How much does the adult retain of the memory of his childish games? How much of his former religious or political belief remains to a person who has become totally indifferent? In all cases of this kind, and there are thousands, the remembered emotional characteristic is _known_, not felt or experienced; this is only an additional intellectual character. It is added to the rest as an accessory; pretty much as, in picturing to ourselves a town, a monument, a landscape visited long ago, we add the recollection of a bright or cloudy sky, of rain or fog which surrounded it.
I call an emotional memory “abstract,” and I justify this term. Emotional states are just as susceptible of abstraction and generalisation as intellectual states. One who has seen many men, who has heard many dogs bark or frogs croak, forms to himself a generic image of the human figure, of the barking of dogs, or the croaking of frogs. This is a schematic, half-abstract, half-concrete representation, formed through the accumulation of rough resemblances and the elimination of differences. In the same way, a person who has several times suffered from toothache, colic, or headache, who has had paroxysms of anger or fear, hate or love, forms to himself a generic impression of these different states by means of the same procedure. This is the first step. It would be beside the point to follow here in detail the ascending progress of the mind to higher and ever higher generalisations. In their highest degree, concepts like force, movement, quantity, etc., suppose two things: a word which fixes and represents them, and a potential or latent knowledge, hidden under the word and preventing it from being a mere _flatus vocis_. He who does not possess this potential knowledge, who is incapable of resolving the superior abstractions, first into medium, then into inferior ones, then into concrete _data_, possesses only an empty concept. So for the affective states the terms emotion, passion, sensibility, etc., are nothing but abstractions, and in order to verify these terms and give them a real significance, we must have experiences in the region of feeling, concrete data. People who speak of a state of feeling which they have never experienced, which they know only by hearsay, have an empty concept. States of feeling are a material susceptible of all degrees of abstraction, like sensory material.
The false or abstract memory of feeling is only a sign, a simulacrum, a substitute for the real occurrence, an intellectualised state added to the purely intellectual elements of the impression, and nothing more.
2. The true or concrete memory of impressions consists in the _actual_ reproduction of a former state of feeling, with all its characteristics. This is necessary—at least in theory—if it is to be complete. The nearer it approaches to totality, the more accurate it is. Here the recollection does not consist merely in the representation of conditions and circumstances, in short, of intellectual states, but in the revival of the state of feeling itself as such, _i.e._, as _felt_. I have already given instances of this: Fouillée’s experiment, the cases of Littré and Sully-Prudhomme; those numbered III. and IV., so clear and precise, show that a true memory of impressions, independent of its intellectual accompaniment, is no chimera.
Bain says that the emotions, “in their strict character of emotions proper, have the minimum of revivability; but being always incorporated with the sensations of the higher senses, they share in the superior revivability of sights and sounds.” On which Professor W. James makes the following comment: "But he fails to point out that the revival of sights and sounds may be _ideal_ without ceasing to be distinct; whilst the emotion, to be distinct, must become real again. Professor Bain seems to forget that an ‘ideal emotion,’ and a real emotion prompted by an ideal object, are two very different things."[106]
-----
Footnote 106:
_Psychology_, ii. 474.
-----
I maintain, on the contrary, that we have here only two different stages of the same thing; the first ineffectual and abortive, the second complete; and the subject which now occupies us must either have been in a very confused state, or very negligently treated, for a clear mind like that of W. James not to have seen that affective memories, like others, aim at becoming actual states of feeling. We ought not, however, to forget the indisputable fact that our consciousness only exists in the present. For a recollection, however distant, to exist, as far as I am concerned, it must re-enter the narrow area of _present_ consciousness; otherwise it is buried in the depths of the unconscious and equivalent to the non-existent. We have thus (not to speak of the present-future) a present-present and a present-past—viz., that of memory; and this is only distinguished from the other by certain additional marks which it is needless to enumerate, but which consist principally in its appearing like an initial state, though, in general, less intense. Now these indispensable conditions of memory are the same for both intellectual and emotional states. If, with my eyes shut, I can call up the vision of St. Peter’s at Rome (if I were an architect, with a good visual memory, I should see it in all its details), my impression is an _actual_ one, and only becomes a memory by the addition of secondary characteristics, such as repetition and a lower degree of intensity. The two cases are similar; in both, the revived impression, according to the law formulated by Dugald Stewart and Taine, is accompanied by a momentary belief which places it in the position of an actual reality. But the recollection of a feeling, it will be said, has this special property, that it is associated with organic and physiological states which make of it a real emotion. I reply that it _must_ be so, for an emotion which does not vibrate through the whole body is nothing but a purely intellectual state. To expect that we should actually revive a state of feeling without reviving also its organic conditions, is to expect the impossible, to state the problem in contradictory terms. We should, in that case, simply have its substitute, its abstraction, _i.e._, the false affective memory which is a variety of intellectual memory; the emotion will be _re_cognised, not _re_vived.
Finally, the ideal of every recollection is that, while keeping its character of being already experienced, it should be adequate in such measure as was possible for the original impression. The revival of impressions is an internal operation, whose extreme form is hallucination. For the two forms of memory, intellectual and emotional, the ideal is the same, only each has its special mechanism for realising it.
There are all possible degrees of transition from the simple bald representation of the words pleasure or pain, love or fear, to the acute, fully and entirely felt representation of these states. In a crowd of people taken at random, one might, with the help of adequate information, determine all the intermediate degrees, from the abstract to the concrete. Still more, these may be met with in the same individual. When the poet says that “Sadness departs upon the wings of Time,” his meaning, in psychological language, is that the affective memory is gradually transformed into an intellectual memory. We know that certain artists, in order to get rid of the memory of a sorrow or a passion, have fixed it in a work of art. This was Goethe’s method; every one knows the story of _Werther_, to quote but one example. One of my correspondents employs the same procedure with success; _i.e._, in the case we are dealing with, the question is how to transfer emotion to the region of the imagination, and, consequently, intellectualise it.
I have said that in certain persons the revival of emotional states seems to be complete. Is it so in fact? I believe that it is impossible to give a precise answer to this question; and here we have a point where the emotional memory differs from the intellectual memory.
A given recollection is considered accurate; but in the majority of cases this is only an illusion. Nearly always, in revived impressions, there are deductions and losses, sometimes additions; sometimes they include _plus_, sometimes _minus_ factors. At any rate, in the intellectual order, there are certain cases where one can say that the recollection is perfect, without the least gap or error; and this affirmation is legitimate because verifiable. It is quite sufficient to compare the copy with the original. If I enter a hall of the Alhambra with my eyes closed, I can ascertain whether the inner vision which I have retained from a former visit is adequate to the reality. I can check my recollection of a passage of music by the actual hearing of the same. The painter mentioned by Wigan who executed his portraits from memory, Mozart reconstructing Allegri’s _Miserere_, are the classic examples of perfect cases where the impression is revived with irreproachable exactitude.
But in the region of the feelings this comparison is impossible, because two subjective states, of which one is the original and one the copy, cannot co-exist in the same individual, and because the primary impression cannot be objectivised. I see but one way of getting over the difficulty so as to arrive at an approximately correct answer. This would consist in comparing the revived emotional state with a written document dating from the moment of the first impression; and even this impression is open to doubt. J. J. Rousseau, speaking of the enthusiasm aroused by the love-letters of the _Nouvelle Héloïse_, tells us that they were inspired by his own love for Madame d’Houdetot, and adds, “What would they have said could they have read the originals!” It is possible that Rousseau was more or less mistaken; but this is a comparison of the kind I am suggesting. A correspondent, well equipped for psychological observations, and accustomed to note down the day’s impressions, had promised me to attempt such a comparison between the actual recollection and the written document; but various causes have prevented the accomplishment of this purpose. One might possibly, without much trouble, chance to recover a letter written under the impression of the moment, and compare it with the present emotional recollection which, rightly or wrongly, we consider most correct. For my part, I am inclined to doubt whether, in the case of feelings, there is ever a complete correspondence between the original and the copy; but this is merely a hypothetical view.
It still remains to say a few words on forgetfulness in the region of the emotions. Affective amnesia is found in two forms—one pathological, the other normal.
I pass over in silence the morbid manifestations, whose study would be both extensive and curious, but would lead me away from my principal aim, which is a practical one. We find numerous examples of the loss of altruistic, moral, or religious feelings, of partial or total indifference to the past, of complete insensibility—the _Gemütslosigkeit_ of the German alienists.
I confine myself to the consideration of affective amnesia under its simplest and most widely-known form. Nothing is more frequently met with. In the first place, the single fact that most psychologists either neglect or deny the phenomenon of emotional memory, constitutes a presumption that its function is not a very obvious one. Moreover, that emotional memory which I have designated the false or abstract one, may, without prejudice, be considered as a mitigated form of forgetfulness. Finally, eliminating the non-emotional temperaments as irrelevant to our subject, we may find, even among the emotional, many who feel acutely, but do not retain their emotions. Every one knows people whose whole nature is shaken by sorrow, joy, love, indignation; they seem for a long time as if possessed; a few weeks later, not a trace remains. Emotions glide off their minds as a thunder-shower does off the roofs. Now this affective amnesia has a great influence on conduct.
Here, in fact, are two general truths derived from experience, and in my opinion incontestable:—
On the one hand, pleasant and painful sensations are the most powerful, if not the only motive forces of human activity.
On the other, there are people in whom emotions are revived strongly, weakly, or not at all.
The conclusion is that the portion of individual experience resulting from the pleasures and pains experienced, will show itself, as to its efficacy, strongly, feebly, or not at all, according to the individual. The prodigal who has ruined himself and is restored to opulence by an unexpected chance, if he has not preserved a lively recollection of his privations, will begin his extravagant career over again; if his painful recollections are of a stable character, they will act on his natural tendencies as a restraining or inhibitory force. The drunkard and the glutton will not repeat their excesses as long as the impression of the after-effects remains vivid. The educator, as every one knows, has no hold over a child on whom the recollection of rewards and punishments has no effect. I have already mentioned the state of mind which frequently succeeds dangerous confinements; this, again, is a case of affective amnesia. The absence of sympathy, in many men, is only an incapacity for reviving the recollection of the ills they have suffered themselves, and consequently for feeling them in others. These are well-known facts, of which it is needless to lengthen the list; but however well known they may be, their psychological reason is, in my opinion, not always apprehended, because the importance of the emotional memory has not been recognised.
Affective amnesia, therefore, plays a much more important part in human life than we are apt to think. It often lets us into the secret of strange modes of action, though I would not assert that it _alone_ is sufficient to explain these everywhere and always.
