MEMORY. The term "Memory" denotes the mental proc esses whereby past experience is recalled to present conscious ness. Used strictly it denotes an individual's recall of his own life story. His memory knowledge is what he can recall of events which happened to him in the past. The knowledge is personal and is referred to the past. It is recalled with some set ting or background. "I remember the first time I rode in a motor car." "I remember posting the letter myself on Monday." All personal reminiscence is memory in this strict sense. In a looser use of the term memory denotes the recall of any knowledge which an individual has acquired through his past experience. Such knowledge is not recalled as part of the individual's life story. It is not referred to his past and it is impersonal. The knowledge has been acquired in the past and may even be about past events but it is remembered as an item of knowledge with out a setting in personal experience. For example one remembers how to put up a given electric circuit but one need not recall when and how one acquired this knowledge nor recall the previous occa sions on which one had set up this circuit. An individual's mem ory knowledge of Henry VIII.'s matrimonial adventures is knowl edge about these past events, but not of the individual's own past and it is not necessarily more past for him than his knowledge of the fate of Charles I. The time order of these items of memory knowledge is determined by their place in his knowledge of Eng lish History and not by any personal reminiscences of when or how he learnt these facts.
to the privations of childhood, the muscles of an athlete to years of training. Both the immediate and the remote past of an organ ism are retained in its habits, its present abilities and disabilities. What is true of bodily life is true of mental life. Ability to pick out the overtones in a chord testifies to past musical training, skill in typewriting to months of practice, dislike of cats to an episode in childhood of which there may be no remembrance. This last example will serve to bring out the difference between retentiveness and memory. The events of a life story would form no story, could have no continuity one with another, unless at every moment the past lived on into the present. But such con tinuity does not necessarily involve knowledge of the past. If there were memory in the strict sense of the cat episode, there would be a recognized continuity between the present dislike of cats and the episode in question. But there may be no recall of this far away episode of childhood. The individual may only know of it through the testimony of others. Although there may be no memory of this event, there is, none the less, continuity; the cat episode is retained and the present dislike of cats is evi dence thereof. Memory is based on retentiveness, but is a more specialized characteristic of mental life. We may specify it thus: in retentiveness the past is continued on into the present and loses itself in making the present what it is; in memory the past is known directly for what it was in its own passing or indirectly by the contribution it has made to the sum of knowledge. All organisms show retentiveness but only the higher animals give evidence of memory. It is doubtful whether any animal other than man evinces memory in the more restricted sense, ability to recall incidents with a consciousness of their setting in the past life story. This reproduction of past experience may only be pos sible where there is the highly organized nervous system found in man.