| Memory, Logic and Ethics |
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Memory, Logic and Ethics.
The title that I have given to this chapter at once opens the way to
misinterpretation. It might appear as if the author supports the view that
logical and ethical values were the objects exclusively of empirical
psychology, psychical phenomena, like perception and sensation, and that logic
and ethics, therefore, were subsections of psychology and based upon
psychology.
I declare at once that I call this view, the so-called psychologismus, at once
false and injurious. It is false because it can lead to nothing; and injurious
because, while it hardly touches logic and ethics, it overthrows psychology
itself. The exclusion of logic and ethics from the foundations of psychology,
and the insertion of them in an appendix, is one of the results of the
overgrowth of the doctrine of empirical perception, of that strange heap of
dead, fleshless bones which is known as empirical psychology, and from which
all real experience has been excluded. I have nothing to do with the empirical
school, and in this matter lean towards the transcendentalism of Kant.
As the object of my work, however, is to discover the differences between
different members of humanity, and not to discuss categories that would hold
good for the angels in heaven, I shall not follow Kant closely, but remain
more directly in psychological paths.
The justification of the title of this chapter must be reached along other
lines. The tedious, because entirely new, demonstration of the earlier part of
my work has shown that the human memory stands in intimate relation with
things hitherto supposed unconnected with it - such things as time, value,
genius, immortality. I have attempted to show that memory stands in intimate
connection with all these. There must be some strong reason for the complete
absence of earlier allusions to this side of the subject. I believe the reason
to be no more than the inadequacy and slovenliness which hitherto have spoiled
theories of memory.
. . . As memory has been shown to be a special character unconnected with the
lower spheres of psychical life, and the exclusive property of human beings,
it is not surprising that it is closely related to such higher things as the
idea of value and time, and the craving for immortality, which is absent in
animals, and possible to men only in so far as they possess the quality of
genius. If memory be an essentially human thing, part of the deepest being of
humanity, finding expression in mankind's most peculiar qualities, then it
will not be surprising if memory be also related to the phenomena of logic and
ethics. I have now to explore this relationship.
I may set out from the old proverb that liars have bad memories. It is certain
that the pathological liar has practically no memory. About male liars I shall
have more to say; they are not common, however. But if we remember what was
said as to the absence of memory amongst women we shall not be surprised at
the existence of the numerous proverbs and common sayings about the
untruthfulness of women. It is evident that a being whose memory is very
slight, and who can recall only in the most imperfect fashion what it has said
or done, or suffered, must lie easily if it has the gift of speech. The
impulse to untruthfulness will be hard to resist if there is a practical
object to be gained, and if the influence that comes from a full conscious
reality of the past be not present. The impulse to lie is stronger in woman,
because, unlike that of man, her memory is not continuous, whilst her life is
discrete, unconnected, discontinuous, swayed by the sensations and perceptions
of the moment instead of dominating them. Unlike man, her experiences float
past without being referred, so to speak, to a definite, permanent centre; she
does not feel herself, past and present, to be one and the same throughout all
her life. It happens almost to every man that sometimes he "does not
understand himself"; indeed, with very many men, it happens (leaving out of
the question the facts of psychical periodicity) that if they think over their
pasts in their minds they find it very difficult to refer all the events to a
single conscious personality; they do not grasp how it could have been that
they, being what they feel themselves at the time to be, could ever have done
or felt or thought this, that, or the other. And yet in spite of the
difficulty, they know that they had gone through these experiences. The
feeling of identity in all circumstances of life is quite wanting in the true
woman, because her memory, even if exceptionally good, is devoid of
continuity. The consciousness of identity of the male, even although he may
fail to understand his own past, manifests itself in the very desire to
understand that past. Women, if they look back on their earlier lives, never
understand themselves, and do not even wish to understand themselves, and this
reveals itself in the scanty interest they give to the attempts of man to
understand them. The woman does not interest herself about herself, and hence
there have been no female psychologists, no psychology of women written by a
woman, and she is incapable of grasping the anxious desire of the man to
understand the beginning, middle, and end of his individual life in their
relation to each other, and to interpret the whole as a continual, logical,
necessary sequence.
At this point there is a natural transition to logic. A creature like woman,
the absolute woman, who is not conscious of her own identity at different
stages of her life, has no evidence of her own identity at different stages of
her life, has no evidence of the identity of the subject-matter of thought at
different times. If in her mind the two stages of a change cannot be present
simultaneously by means of memory, it is impossible for her to make the
comparison and note the change. A being whose memory is never sufficiently
good as to make it psychologically possible to perceive identity through the
lapse of time, so as to enable her, for instance, to pursue a quantity through
a long mathematical reckoning; such a creature in the extreme case would be
unable to control her memory for even the moment of time required to say that
A will still be A in the next moment, to pronounce judgment on the identity A
= A, or on the opposite proposition that A is not equal to A, for that
proposition also requires a continuous memory of A to make the comparison
possible.
I have been making no mere joke, no facetious sophism or paradoxical
proposition. I assert that the judgment of identity depends on conceptions,
never on mere perceptions and complexes of perceptions, and the conceptions,
as logical conceptions, are independent of time, retaining their constancy,
whether I, as a psychological entity, think them constant or not. . . .
I have already shown that the continuous memory is the vanquisher of time,
and, indeed, is necessary even for the idea of time to be formed. And so the
continuous memory is the psychological expression of the logical proposition
of identity. The absolute woman, in whom memory is absent, cannot take the
proposition of identity, or its contradictory, or the exclusion of the
alternative, as axiomatic.
Besides these three conditions of logical thought, the fourth condition, the
containing of the conclusion in the major premiss, is possible only through
memory. That proposition is the groundwork of the syllogism. The premisses
psychologically precede the conclusion, and must be retained by the thinking
person whilst the minor premiss applies the law of identity or of
non-identity. The grounds for the conclusion must lie in the past. And for
this reason continuity which dominates the mental processes of man is bound up
with causality. Every psychological application of the relation of a
conclusion to its premisses implies the continuity of memory to guarantee the
identity of the propositions. As woman has no continuous memory she can have
no principium rationis sufficientis.
And so it appears that woman is without logic.
George Simmel has held this familiar statement to be erroneous, inasmuch as
women have been known to draw conclusions with the strongest consistency. That
a woman in a concrete case can unrelentingly pursue a given course at the
stimulation of some object is no more a proof that she understands the
syllogism, than is her habit of perpetually recurring to disproved arguments a
proof that the law of identity is an axiom for her. The point at issue is
whether or no they recognise the logical axioms as the criteria of the
validity of their thoughts, as the directors of their process of thinking,
whether they make or do not make these the rule of conduct and the principle
of judgment. A woman cannot grasp that one must act from principle; as she has
no continuity she does not experience the necessity for logical support of her
mental processes. Hence the ease with which women assume opinions. If a woman
gives vent to an opinion, or statement, and a man is so foolish as to take it
seriously and to ask her for the proof of it, she regards the request as
unkind and offensive, and as impugning her character. A man feels ashamed of
himself, feels himself guilty if he has neglected to verify a thought, whether
or no that thought has been uttered by him; he feels the obligation to keep to
the logical standard which he has set up for himself. Woman resents any
attempt to require from her that her thoughts should be logical. She may be
regarded as "logically insane."
The most common defect which one could discover in the conversation of a
woman, if one really wished to apply to it the standard of logic (a feat that
man habitually shuns, so showing his contempt for a woman's logic) is the
quaternio terminorum, that form of equivocation which is the result of an
incapacity to retain definite presentations; in other words, the result of a
failure to grasp the law of identity. Woman is unaware of this; she does not
realise the law nor make it a criterion of thought. Man feels himself bound to
logic; the woman is without this feeling. It is only this feeling of guilt
that guarantees man's efforts to think logically. Probably the most profound
saying of Descartes, and yet one that has been widely misunderstood, is that
all errors are crimes.
The source of all error in life is failure of memory. Thus logic and ethics,
both of which deal with the furtherance of truth and join in its highest
service, are dependent on memory. The conception dawns on us that Plato was
not so far wrong when he connected discernment with memory. Memory, it is
true, is not a logical and ethical act, but it is a logical and ethical
phenomenon. A man who has had a vivid and deep perception regards it as a
fault, if some half-hour afterwards he is thinking of something different,
even if external influences have intervened. A man thinks himself
unconscientious and blameworthy if he notices that he has not thought of a
particular portion of his life for a long time. Memory, moreover, is linked
with morality, because it is only through memory that repentance is possible.
All forgetfulness is in itself immoral. And so reverence is a moral exercise;
it is a duty to forget nothing, and for this reason we should reverence the
dead. Equally from logical and ethical motives, man tries to carry logic into
his past, in order that past and present may become one.
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