Yet the perception is very different from faculty to faculty;certainly it is sight and not desire that sees the object; desire is stirred merely as a result of the seeing, by a transmission; its act is not in the nature of an identification of an object seen; all is simply blind response [automatic reaction].Similarly with rage; sight reveals the offender and the passion leaps; we may think of a shepherd seeing a wolf at his flock, and a dog, seeing nothing, who springs to the scent or the sound.
In other words the desiring faculty has had the emotion, but the trace it keeps of the event is not a memory; it is a condition, something passively accepted: there is another faculty that was aware of the enjoyment and retains the memory of what has happened.
This is confirmed by the fact that many satisfactions which the desiring faculty has enjoyed are not retained in the memory: if memory resided in the desiring faculty, such forgetfulness could not be.
29.Are we, then, to refer memory to the perceptive faculty and so make one principle of our nature the seat of both awareness and remembrance?
Now supposing the very Shade, as we were saying in the case of Hercules, has memory, then the perceptive faculty is twofold.
[(And if (on the same supposition) the faculty that remembers is not the faculty that perceives, but some other thing, then the remembering faculty is twofold.]
And further if the perceptive faculty [= the memory] deals with matters learned [as well as with matters of observation and feeling]
it will be the faculty for the processes of reason also: but these two orders certainly require two separate faculties.
Must we then suppose a common faculty of apprehension [one covering both sense perceptions and ideas] and assign memory in both orders to this?
The solution might serve if there were one and the same percipient for objects of sense and objects of the Intellectual-Kind; but if these stand in definite duality, then, for all we can say or do, we are left with two separate principles of memory; and, supposing each of the two orders of soul to possess both principles, then we have four.
And, on general grounds, what compelling reason is there that the principle by which we perceive should be the principle by which we remember, that these two acts should be vested in the one faculty? Why must the seat of our intellectual action be also the seat of our remembrance of that action? The most powerful thought does not always go with the readiest memory; people of equal perception are not equally good at remembering; some are especially gifted in perception, others, never swift to grasp, are strong to retain.
But, once more, admitting two distinct principles, something quite separate remembering what sense-perception has first known- still this something must have felt what it is required to remember?
No; we may well conceive that where there is to be memory of a sense-perception, this perception becomes a mere presentment, and that to this image-grasping power, a distinct thing, belongs the memory, the retention of the object: for in this imaging faculty the perception culminates; the impression passes away but the vision remains present to the imagination.
By the fact of harbouring the presentment of an object that has disappeared, the imagination is, at once, a seat of memory: where the persistence of the image is brief, the memory is poor; people of powerful memory are those in whom the image-holding power is firmer, not easily allowing the record to be jostled out of its grip.
Remembrance, thus, is vested in the imaging faculty; and memory deals with images.Its differing quality or degree from man to man, we would explain by difference or similarity in the strength of the individual powers, by conduct like or unlike, by bodily conditions present or absent, producing change and disorder or not- a point this, however, which need not detain us here.
30.But what of the memory of mental acts: do these also fall under the imaging faculty?
If every mental act is accompanied by an image we may well believe that this image, fixed and like a picture of the thought, would explain how we remember the object of knowledge once entertained.
But if there is no such necessary image, another solution must be sought.Perhaps memory would be the reception, into the image-taking faculty, of the Reason-Principle which accompanies the mental conception: this mental conception- an indivisible thing, and one that never rises to the exterior of the consciousness- lies unknown below; the Reason-Principle the revealer, the bridge between the concept and the image-taking faculty exhibits the concept as in a mirror; the apprehension by the image-taking faculty would thus constitute the enduring presence of the concept, would be our memory of it.
This explains, also, another fact: the soul is unfailingly intent upon intellection; only when it acts upon this image-taking faculty does its intellection become a human perception:
intellection is one thing, the perception of an intellection is another: we are continuously intuitive but we are not unbrokenly aware: the reason is that the recipient in us receives from both sides, absorbing not merely intellections but also sense-perceptions.
31.But if each of the two phases of the soul, as we have said, possesses memory, and memory is vested in the imaging faculty, there must be two such faculties.Now that is all very well as long as the two souls stand apart; but, when they are at one in us, what becomes of the two faculties, and in which of them is the imaging faculty vested?
If each soul has its own imaging faculty the images must in all cases be duplicated, since we cannot think that one faculty deals only with intellectual objects, and the other with objects of sense, a distinction which inevitably implies the co-existence in man of two life-principles utterly unrelated.