tentiveness, commonly understood by the familiar names 'memory' and 'recollection,' is essential," says Bain, “to the operation of the two powers [the sense of difference and the sense of agreement]; we could not discriminate two successive impressions if the first did not persist mentally to be contrasted with the second; and we could not identify a present feeling with one that had left no trace in our framework." But that which enters directly into our experience is an impression coming up again; memory, recollection, recalling, reproducing, is the fundamental fact of our mental acquisitions.

Dependent upon it is consciousness itself; it is when an impression comes back variously discriminated or identified under present suggestion that we are conscious. To use a favourite figure of speech, nearly all the impressions of our life and of the ancestral life are at any given moment behind the scenes; under some call of association, one steps forward and then another, and these play their part for a brief space on the stage. Our conscious life is the sum of these entrances and exits; behind the scenes, as we infer, there lies a vast reserve which we call the unconscious, finding a name for it by the simple device of prefixing the negative particle.

This vast reserve of the unconscious is the subject of the philosophical system of Hartmann. In the first volume of his work that author gives a systematic exposition of all that belongs to the sphere of the un· conscious-the 'Phaenomenologie des Unbewussten.'

"I beg of the reader," he says, "that he take no preliminary exception to the notion of unconscious idea, because at the outset it may have little positive significance; the positive meaning of the term cannot be built up except in the course of the inquiry. At the outset it must suffice that we mean by it an unknown cause of certain processes which fall outside the sphere of our consciousness, but are not of an alien nature."

The book opens with a passage quoted from Kant (Anthropologie,' § 5): "To have ideas and yet not to be conscious of them-therein seems to lie a contradiction; for how can we know that we have them when we are not conscious of them? However, we may still be mediately aware of holding an idea, although we are not directly conscious of it." These plain words of the great Königsberg thinker, says Hartmann, give the point of view of the philosophy of the unconscious. They imply, however, that the unconscious is an inference; the whole "phenomenology" of it rests on a 'metaphysic" or philosophical groundwork of inferential knowledge. That a systematic exposition of instinct, reflex action, the germs of volition, and the like, is any the worse for that no one will say; still, the fact remains that the unconscious of Hartmann's treatise has no better name than one constructed by prefixing the negative particle. Other foundation than that these things are out of consciousness Hartmann does not lay for his superstructure.

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It would thus appear that the basis of all that lies

behind the scenes is the mere negation of consciousness; and it must needs be so if the latter is capable of no analysis. In the last resort, however, it is not consciousness that we come to, but memory. Some such admission is made by Hartmann himself when he says (ii, 9): "Das Bewusstsein erhält seinen Werth erst durch das Gedächtniss." But if consciousness be what it is by virtue of memory, the author of the Philosophy of the Unconscious makes singularly little account of memory throughout his exposition. It may be doubted if the word occurs in his two volumes, except in the sentence just quoted and in the sentence following it: "But to the unconscious we can ascribe no memory."

While the system of Hartmann altogether ignores, and even denies the existence of unconscious memory, it exalts "unconscious will" into a place of first importance. Every act of will is a reflex effect, and, conversely, every reflex effect is an act of will. The objection will naturally arise that if such words as "will," "volition," "voluntary action," are to have a meaning proper to themselves and distinctive, that meaning is that the action is always a conscious one and never a reflex, automatic, or unconscious one; and that would hold good whether we take automatic actions to be a degradation of actions once voluntarily and consciously practised, or whether we follow Mr. Spencer in regarding them as on the upward road to volitional rank.

But if "unconscious will" is a paradox trans

gressing the legitimate use of words, is not "unconsious memory" in the same condemnation?

If we turn to Mr. Herbert Spencer, who deals with the same class of evolutional problems as the German dialectician, we shall find that he does actually place memory and will on the same footing: "Memory, Reason, and Feeling simultaneously arise as the automatic actions become complex, infrequent, and hesitating; and Will, arising at the same time, is necessitated by the same conditions. As the advance from the simple and indissolubly coherent psychical changes to the psychical changes that are involved and dissolubly coherent, is in itself the commencement of Memory, Reason, and Feeling, so, too, it is itself the commencement of Will." But elsewhere Mr. Spencer speaks of "organic memory," meaning thereby the faculty of unconscious retentiveness whose real existence is here in question. Organic memory or unconscious memory, as we shall contend, is no mere form of words or figure of speech, whatever be the case with "unconscious will." The real basis for the doctrine of unconscious memory is found in the biological phenomena of generation.

Hartmann's omission of the principle of unconscious retentiveness (with reproduction) from his 'Philosophy of the Unconscious,' will explain his omission of all reference to the Scottish school in his chapter on "Forerunners in the Doctrine of the Unconscious." I give in a note * Hamilton's reference to Stewart's

* Hamilton, in his edition of Reid (p. 551) says: "Mr. Stewart has made an ingenious attempt to explain sundry of the phenomena

treatment of the subject, and the bearing of that on the original form (in Hartmann's estimation) of the philosophy of the unconscious, in the writings of Leibnitz. Of considerably greater importance is Hamilton's own view of memory and its relation to that which is "out of consciousness."

"Consciousness supposes memory," says Hamilton, "and we are only conscious as we are able to connect and contrast one instant of our intellectual existence with another." Now, if we scrutinise more closely Hamilton's use of the word " memory," we shall come at once to the cardinal point in the problem of the unconscious: "Memory, strictly so denominated, is the power of retaining knowledge in the mind, but out of consciousness: I say, retaining knowledge in the mind, but out of consciousness; for, to bring the retentum out of memory into consciousness, is the function of a totally different faculty. We must further be endowed with a faculty of recalling it out of unconsciousness into consciousness; in short, a reproductive power. This reproductive faculty is

6

referred to the occult principle of habit, in his chapter on Attention, in the first volume of his Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind.' It is to be regretted that he had not studied (he even treats it as inconceivable) the Leibnitzian doctrine of what has not been well denominated obscure perceptions or ideas—that is, acts and affections of mind, which, manifesting their existence in their effects, are themselves out of consciousness or apperception. The fact of such latent mental modifications is now established beyond all rational doubt; and on the supposition of their reality, we are able to solve various psychological phenomena otherwise inexplicable. Among these are many of those attributed to habit."