Abstract
On a walk through the streets I meet a man whose face, frame, gait and speech provoke in me a lively idea of such a set of charateristics in different surroundings. I recognize X who stands before me as a sense experience to be the same as forms a part of my memories from the other setting. Recognition and identification would be senseless unless X were given twice over. Soon I recall previous conversations with him in the other surroundings, joint excursions and so on. Similar situations are observed in the most varied circumstances, and we may gather them under a rule: a sense experience, consisting of ABCD, revives the memory of an earlier one consisting of AKLM, thus reproducing it as an idea. Since KLM is not generally reproduced by BCD, we naturally take it that the common element A starts the process. First A is reproduced, and then follow KLM which were directly experienced with it or with other simultaneous features already reproduced. All processes in this field can be subsumed under this one law of association.
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Notes
Experience has taught us to recognize stabilities; our mental organisation easily adapts itself to them and affords us advantages. Next, we consciously and arbitrarily introduce the presupposition of further stabilities expecting further benefits if the presupposition proves itself. The assumption of a concept given a priori as foundation of this methodological procedure we neither need nor would derive any advantage from. It would be a mistake in view of the obviously empirical formation of this concept.
C. L. Morgan, Comparative Psychology, London 1894, pp. 85 f.
This however is also the behaviour of decorticated birds. The phenomenon thus would seem to rest on an ancestrally acquired reflex; cf. the end of this chapter.
Schneider, Der tierische Wille, Leipzig 1880.
Observation by my daughter.
Next to the writings of Morgan, the following are instructive as to the psychology of lower and higher animals: K. Möbius, Die Bewegungen der Tiere und ihr psychischer Horizont (Monographs of the Naturwissensch. Verein f. Schleswig-Holstein 1873); A. Oelzelt-Newin, Kleinere philosophische Schriften. Zur Psychologie der Seesterne, Vienna 1903. Amongst older books I should recommend H. S. Reimarus, Triebe der Tiere 1790, and J. F. H. Autenrieth, Ansichten über Natur- und Seelenleben 1836.
Wundt, Philosophische Studien X, p. 323.
That not all mental processes are explicable in terms of temporally acquired conscious associations will be discussed later. Here we are concerned with what is intelligible by means of association.
Cf. James, The Principles of Psychology I, pp. 550–604.
Well-known cases of this sort are the following: Voltaire dreams a complete variant canto of the ‘Henriade’. Stranger still is Tartini’s dream of the devil playing him a movement of a sonata that the violinist had been unable to achieve when awake, unless the report be a compromise between fiction and truth.
Jerusalem, Lehrbuch der Psychologie, 3rd. ed. Vienna 1902, p. 91.
These questions will be discussed more fully later.
One might be tempted to regard ‘active’ thinking as essentially different from ‘passive’ idling of thoughts. Yet just as we have no control over sense impressions and memories triggered off by a bodily action, so we have none over a notion of direct or indirect biological interest which always recurs and connects with new series of associations. Cf. P 3, pp. 287–308.
Hobbes, Physica IV, 25.
Anyone who thinks he can build up the world out of consciousness cannot have clearly grasped how complicated is the fact of consciousness. Succinct accounts eminently worth reading on the nature and conditions of consciousness are to be found in Wernicke, Gesammelte Aufsätze, Berlin 1893, pp. 130–145. Cf. also the lectures of Meynert cited below.
Meynert, Populäre Vorträge, Vienna 1892, pp. 2–40.
We can hardly doubt that the different parts of the brain perform differently. If nevertheless, as shown by Goltz, one part of the cortex can gradually function as substitute for another, we cannot think in terms of abrupt limits to functions but only of a gradual localisation in the sense of R. Semon (Die Mneme, Leipzig 1904, p. 160). Cf. also A 4, p. 155.
Kussmaul, Störungen der Sprache, Leipzig 1885.
Ibid., p. 175.
Ibid., p. 182.
On Remarkable disturbances in musicians resembling aphasia and agraphia see R. Wallaschek, Psychologie und Pathologie der Vorstellung, Leipzig J. A. Barth 1905.
Wilbrand, Seelenblindheit, Wiesbaden 1887, pp. 43–51.
Ibid., p. 54.
Ibid., p. 57.
A. Forel, Der Hypnotismus, 6th ed., pp. 236f. contains the description of a most peculiar case of amnesia.
In the light of such periodic disturbances of memory, observations like those of Swoboda (Die Perioden des menschlichen Organismus, 1904) seem not at all so extraordinary as they might look at first glance.
C. Detto, ‘Über den Begriff des Gedächtnisses in seiner Beleuchtung für die Biologie’, Naturwiss. Wochenschr. 1905, No. 42. The author will hardly suppose that Hering or Semon would fall into the errors he criticizes. However, I think he underrates the advantage of examining the organic from two sides. Psychological observation can reveal the existence of physical processes that we should not so readily come to know by way of physics.
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© 1976 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Mach, E., Hiebert, E.N. (1976). Memory. Reproduction and Association. In: Knowledge and Error. Vienna Circle Collection, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1428-1_3
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