on The Scope of.

THE 'associationist' schools have thus constructed a psychology without the soul by taking discrete 'ideas', faint or vivid, and showing how, by their cohesions, repulsions and forms of succession, such things as reminiscences, perceptions, emotions, volitions, passions, theories and all the other furnishings of an individual's mind may be engendered. The very Self or ego of the individual comes in this way to be viewed no longer as as the pre-existing source of the representations, but rather as their last and most complicated fruit.

William James, The Principles of Psychology vol. One.

However the associationist may represent the present ideas as thronging and arranging themselves, still, the spiritualist insists, he has in the end to admit that something, be it brain, be it 'ideas', be it 'association', knows past time as past, and fills it out with this or that event. And when the spiritualist calls memory an 'irreductible faculty', he says no more than this admission that the associanist already grants.

And yet the admission is far from being a satisfactory simplicifcation of the concrete facts. For why should this god-given Faculty retain so much better the events of yesterday than those of last year, and, best of all, those of an hour ago?  Why, again, in old age should its grasp of childhood's events seem firmest?  Why should illness and exhaustion enfeeble it?  Why should repeating an experience strenghten our recollection of it? Why should drugs, fevers, asphyxia, and excitement resuscitate things long gone forgotten?  If we contend ourselves with merely affirming that the faculty of memory is so peculiary constituted by nature as to exhibit just these oddities, we seem little the better for having invoked it, for our explanation becomes as complicated as that of crude facts with which we started. Moreover there is something grotesque and irrational in the supposition that the sould is equipped with elementary powers of such an ingeniously intricate sort.

Why should our memory cling more easily to the near than the remote?  Why should it lose its grasp of proper sooner than of abstract names? Such peculiarities seem quite fantastic; and might, for aught we can see a priori, be the precise opposites of what they are. Evidently, then, the faculty does not exist absolutely, but works under conditions; and the quest of the conditions becomes the psychologist's most interesting task.