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[ Pg 643 ] CHAPTER XVI . MEMORY . In the last chapter what concerned us was the direct intuition of time . We found it limited to intervals of considerably less than a minute . Beyond its borders extends the immense region of conceived time , past and future , into one direction or another of which we mentally project all the events which we think of as real , and form a systematic order of them by giving to each a date . The relation of conceived to intuited time is just like that of the fictitious space pictured on the flat back - scene of a theatre to the actual space of the stage . The objects painted on the former ( trees , columns , houses in a receding street , etc . ) carry back the series of similar objects solidly placed upon the latter , and we think we see things in a continuous perspective , when we really see thus only a few of them and imagine that we see the rest . The chapter which lies before us deals with the way in which we paint the remote past , as it were , upon a canvas in our memory , and yet often imagine that we have direct vision of its depths . The stream of thought flows on ; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion . Of some , no memory survives the instant of their passage . Of others , it is confined to a few moments , hours , or days . Others , again , leave vestiges which are indestructible , and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures . Can we explain these differences ? PRIMARY MEMORY . The first point to be noticed is that for a state of mind to survive in memory it must have endured , for a certain length of time . In other words , it must be what I call a substantive state . Prepositional and conjunctival states of mind are not remembered as independent facts — we cannot recall [ Pg 644 ] just how we felt when we said ' how ' or ' notwithstanding . ' Our consciousness of these transitive states is shut up to their own moment — hence one difficulty in introspective psychologizing . Any state of mind which is shut up to its own moment and fails to become an object for succeeding states of mind , is as if it belonged to another stream of thought . Or rather , it belongs only physically , not intellectually , to its own stream , forming a bridge from one segment of it to another , but not being appropriated inwardly by former segments or appearing as part of the empirical self , in the manner explained in Chapter X . All the intellectual value for us of a state of mind depends on our after - memory of it . Only then is it combined in a system and knowingly made to contribute to a result . Only then does it count for us . So that the effective consciousness we have of our states is the after - consciousness ; and the more of this there is , the more influence does the original state have , and the more permanent a factor is it of our world . An indelibly - imprinted pain may color a life ; but , as Professor Richet says : " To suffer for only a hundredth of a second is not to suffer at all ; and for my part I would readily agree to undergo a pain , however acute and intense it might be , provided it should last only a hundredth of a second , and leave after it neither reverberation nor recall . " [ 567 ]
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