ive feature of our mental life, and is often
present where at first sight it seems not to be. There is, for example,
a habit of remembering a unique event. When we have once described the
event, the words we have used easily become habitual. We may even have
used words to describe it to ourselves while it was happening; in that
case, the habit of these words may fulfil the function of Bergson's true
memory, while in reality it is nothing but habit-memory. A gramophone,
by the help of suitable records, might relate to us the incidents of its
past; and people are not so different from gramophones as they like to
believe.

In spite, however, of a difficulty in distinguishing the two forms of
memory in practice, there can be no doubt that both forms exist. I can
set to work now to remember things I never remembered before, such
as what I had to eat for breakfast this morning, and it can hardly be
wholly habit that enables me to do this. It is this sort of occurrence
that constitutes the essence of memory Until we have analysed what
happens in such a case as this, we have not succeeded in understanding
memory.

The sort of memory with which we are here concerned is the sort which is
a form of knowledge. Whether knowledge itself is reducible to habit is
a question to which I shall return in a later lecture; for the present
I am only anxious to point out that, whatever the true analysis of
knowledge may be, knowledge of past occurrences is not proved by
behaviour which is due to past experience. The fact that a man can
recite a poem does not show that he remembers any previous occasion on
which he has recited or read it. Similarly, the performances of animals
in getting out of cages or mazes to which they are accustomed do not
prove that they remember having been in the same situation before.
Arguments in favour of (for example) memory in plants are only arguments
in favour of habit-memory, not of knowledge-memory. Samuel Butler's
arguments in favour of the view that an animal remembers something of
the lives of its ancestors* are, when examined, only arguments in favour
of habit-memory. Semon's two books, mentioned in an earlier lecture, do
not touch knowledge-memory at all closely. They give laws according to
which images of past occurrences come into our minds, but do not discuss
our belief that these images refer to past occurrences, which is what
constitutes knowledge-memory. It is this that is of interest to theory
of