Memory and Imagination

The doctrine of reminiscence, as it is set forth in the Meno, arises from a difficulty about inquiry itself. Meno objects that a man cannot search for what he already knows, since he has it, nor for what he does not know, since he would not recognize it if he came upon it. To this Socrates replies that learning is neither discovery nor invention but recollection. The soul, on this view, existed before its embodiment and had knowledge of all things; birth is a kind of forgetting, and teaching is the art of reminding. The account thus assigns to memory a place quite different from the one it usually occupies, for what is recalled was never acquired in the present life at all. Where most writers treat memory as the retention of past particulars, Plato makes it the source of knowledge of the universal, and therefore the origin rather than the record of learning.

The demonstration with the slave boy is offered as evidence rather than as proof. Socrates puts a series of questions about the doubling of a square, giving no answers, and the boy arrives at the correct construction. Since he had never been taught geometry, the knowledge must have been latent in him. The Phaedrus supplies the account of how it came to be there. The soul, before entering a body, traveled in the train of the gods and beheld the Forms; those souls which saw most retain most, and are the most readily reminded by sensible things which resemble the Beautiful, the Just, and the Good. Sensible experience, on this account, is the occasion of recollection but not its content. The bearing of this doctrine upon the origin of ideas is treated more fully under the ideas of Idea and Knowledge, and its dependence upon the soul's immortality under Soul.

Imagination occupies a much smaller place in Plato's discussion, and where it appears it is usually regarded with suspicion. The image-making arts are said in the Republic to stand at two removes from what truly is, since they copy the appearances of things which are themselves copies of the Forms. On this view the image is less an instrument of knowledge than an occasion of deception, and the education of the guardians is arranged so as to control what images are put before the young. The question whether images are indispensable to thought, which Aristotle and Aquinas answer affirmatively, is one that Plato does not raise in this form. The related matters of poetic illusion and the censorship of the arts belong to the discussions of Art and of Education.

The two questions which Plato leaves to the tradition are whether memory is the passive retention of what sense has delivered or the active recovery of what the soul already possesses, and whether the image is an aid to understanding or a hindrance to it. Aristotle answers the first by deriving memory from sense-perception, and the second by making the image the necessary companion of thought. Augustine, examining his own memory, finds in it much that no sense has put there, and so arrives at a position closer to Plato's, though he explains its presence by the creation of the soul rather than by its prior lives.

Against the doctrine of reminiscence, Aristotle derives both memory and imagination from sense-perception. Imagination, or phantasia, he defines in De Anima as the movement which results upon an actual sensation. The perception of an object sets up a motion in the sensitive part, and this motion persists after the object has been withdrawn; the residue is the image, or phantasma. Imagination is accordingly neither perceiving nor judging, though it is not found apart from sensation. It differs from opinion in that the imagining of a thing lies within our power whenever we wish, whereas in forming opinions we are not free, being subject to the alternatives of truth and falsehood. Animals, lacking mind, are largely guided by their imaginations; men are so guided when the mind is temporarily eclipsed by passion, disease, or sleep.

Memory is treated in the short work On Memory and Reminiscence, where it is distinguished from reminiscence. Memory is the retention of a past perception or thought together with the awareness that it belongs to the past, and it belongs to the same part of the soul as imagination. Reminiscence is a further and more deliberate act, a search which proceeds step by step through a series of related terms until the sought item is recovered. We begin from something connected with what we want and follow the links of similarity, contrast, or contiguity. Since this resembles reasoning in its orderly progress, Aristotle assigns reminiscence to men alone, though he allows memory to the higher animals. These are the earliest formulations of what later writers call the laws of association, taken up in different terms by Hobbes, Hume, and James.

Two further consequences deserve notice. The first concerns the bodily conditions of memory. Images are alterations in the body, and retention requires a medium neither too fluid nor too hard to take an impression, which is why the very young and the very old remember badly. The second concerns the dependence of thought upon imagery. Aristotle holds that the soul never thinks without an image, and that the faculty of thinking thinks the forms in the images. This is not the claim that thought is imagination, but that the intellect, in abstracting the universal, must turn to the particulars which imagination supplies. The doctrine of abstraction which rests upon this point is developed at length by Aquinas, and is treated under the ideas of Idea and Mind. Aristotle also proposes natural causes for dreams, attributing their content to slight stimulations of the sense organs and denying that they are sent by the gods for the revealing of the future.

If thought requires images, and images are the residues of bodily sense, the question remains how the intellect comes to know anything which transcends the particular. Aquinas answers by separating the office of the image, which supplies the content, from the office of the agent intellect, which draws the intelligible species out of it. Hobbes, denying that thought transcends the particular at all, dispenses with the difficulty by dispensing with the distinction. The manner in which each of them handles Aristotle's account largely determines what remains of the interior senses in modern psychology.

The tenth book of the Confessions contains the most sustained examination of memory in ancient literature. Augustine enters his memory as a man enters a building, and describes its fields and spacious palaces as the storehouse of everything the senses have delivered: sights, sounds, odors, textures, and tastes. The things themselves are not brought into the memory, he observes, but only their images, which are seized with marvelous speed and stored away as if in cabinets. Yet the inventory does not stop with images. The truths of number and of the liberal disciplines are there, and these, he says, are present not by their images but in themselves. The emotions are there too, so that a man may remember his past grief without grieving. Memory, on this showing, contains more than sense-experience has supplied, and Augustine is led toward a position resembling Plato's doctrine of reminiscence, though he attributes what he finds to the seeds of learning implanted in the soul at its creation rather than to a former life.

The examination of forgetting sharpens the difficulty. When a man labors to recover a forgotten name, he must in some manner already possess it, since he recognizes the right name when it is offered and rejects the wrong ones. Were the name utterly blotted out of mind, Augustine argues, we should not remember it even if we were reminded, for we should not so much as be able to think of looking for it. He concludes that what seems forgotten remains in the memory, hidden rather than destroyed. Memory therefore extends further than consciousness, and holds what the mind does not know that it holds. The question of retention, and of where images are when they are not in use, is one which the metaphor of the storehouse states rather than answers, as James later observes in proposing that the answer lies in the retentiveness of nervous tissue.

Augustine then presses the inquiry beyond psychology. Since he seeks God and seeks Him within, he asks whether God is to be found in memory, and finds that God is neither an image, nor a truth of number, nor a remembered affection, and so belongs to no chamber of the house. The search reaches the limit of memory and passes beyond it. The bearing of this passage upon the knowledge of God is treated under the ideas of God and of Theology, and its account of the mind's presence to itself under Mind.

Two lines of influence run from this discussion. Aquinas takes over the conception of memory as a storehouse of forms, while restricting memory proper to the sensitive part of the soul and denying that the intellect remembers in the same sense. Freud takes over the proposition that what is not consciously remembered may nevertheless be retained, and gives it another cause, holding that such material is kept from consciousness by repression rather than merely lying below the threshold of recall. The difference between concealment which yields to reminding and concealment which yields only to the removal of an emotional obstacle marks the distance between the two accounts.

What Aristotle and Augustine leave as scattered observations, Aquinas arranges into a divided psychology of the senses. The exterior senses, of which there are five, receive the forms of objects present to them. The interior senses work upon what the exterior senses deliver, and of these he enumerates four. The common sense collects and distinguishes the reports of the several external senses. Imagination, or phantasy, retains the sensible forms after the object has been removed, and is described as a storehouse of forms received through the senses. The estimative power apprehends what is useful or harmful without having learned it. The memorative power retains these estimations. The division is not arbitrary, since Aquinas argues that receiving a form and retaining it are distinct operations, and that apprehending an intention which no external sense reports requires a distinct power again.

The distinction between imagination and memory rests upon the distinction between the sensible form and the intention. Imagination holds the shape and color of the wolf; memory holds the assessment that the wolf is to be fled. In animals the assessment is instinctive, and the sheep does not need to be taught. In man the corresponding power is called the cogitative power, or particular reason, because it works under the influence of the intellect and compares particulars as reason compares universals. Human memory is on this account not merely longer or fuller than animal memory but different in the manner of its operation, and man alone, Aquinas holds with Aristotle, is capable of reminiscence, which proceeds by a kind of syllogism through associated terms.

Two further theses may be noted. The first is that all the interior senses require bodily organs, so that imagination and memory may be hindered by a lesion of the corporeal organ or by lethargy, an observation which later inquiries into amnesia and aphasia much extend. The second concerns the relation of memory to intellect. Aquinas restricts memory proper to the sensitive part, since memory includes reference to its object as past, and the intellect knows without such reference. Reciting a poem learned in youth, or reworking a proof once solved, is for him the exercise of a retained habit rather than an act of memory, unless the time and occasion of the learning are also recalled. The relation between habit and retention, which James later brings very close to identity, is treated more fully under the idea of Habit.

The map of the mind's image-handling powers which Aquinas draws is the one against which the moderns define themselves. Hobbes reduces the several interior senses to one motion and its decay. Locke keeps retention and revival but drops the estimative power and the intentions it apprehends. Whether the divisions Aquinas makes answer to real distinctions in the mind, or merely to distinctions in the ways we speak of its acts, is a question which recurs whenever faculty psychology is proposed, and it is considered under the ideas of Mind and Soul.

Cervantes does not discuss memory and imagination in the manner of a philosopher, but in Don Quixote he presents a case which the philosophers would do well to take account of. The hidalgo Alonso Quixano has spent his leisure for many years reading books of chivalry, and the effect of this reading upon him has been, in the words of the novel, that "his brain dried up." What Cervantes means by this is not that the imagination has weakened but that it has grown too strong to be corrected. The furnishings of the mind, drawn entirely from the romances of knight errantry, have become the standards by which incoming perceptions are to be judged. When he rides out as Don Quixote de la Mancha, he meets windmills and sees giants, meets inns and sees castles, meets a peasant woman and sees the Lady Dulcinea. The pattern is not that his senses lie to him. His senses report what is there; his imagination then reinterprets what has been reported, under the pressure of what the books demand the world to contain.

The problem this sets for the tradition's treatment of memory and imagination is that the older accounts, from Aristotle through Aquinas, had placed imagination in a subordinate relation to sensation, as the faculty by which sensible forms are retained and reproduced when the object is no longer present. On those accounts, imagination should follow sensation. What Cervantes shows is that an imagination trained upon a particular literature can lead sensation rather than follow it, and can insist upon its own images against the reports of the senses. Don Quixote is not insane in the ordinary way. In matters outside the range of his reading he is a man of good judgment, and Sancho Panza often has recourse to his advice on ordinary questions. It is only where chivalric patterns are available that the imagination takes over, and it takes over with a force that no appeal to evidence can resist.

The questions raised here connect to the treatments of Opinion, where the disagreement between the knight and the squire becomes a contest between two ways of seeing the same world; to Truth, where the novel raises the issue of whether there is more than one standard by which a report about the world may be judged true; and to Honor, where the chivalric code which governs the knight's imagination also supplies him with the code by which his honor is measured. What belongs to the idea of Memory and Imagination is the display of a case in which a man's memory, loaded with the contents of a library, supplies his imagination with a whole second world, and in which that second world is not a dream he has now and then but the world in which he lives from morning until night.

Hobbes, who treats imagination as "nothing but decaying sense," will have some trouble making room for a case in which imagination appears to be so vigorous that it dictates to sense rather than the reverse. Locke and Hume, placing the materials of the mind in the elements of experience, will likewise be more comfortable with an imagination that recombines what sense has supplied than with an imagination that instructs sense in what to report. The tradition will eventually, with the Romantic writers and with Freud, return to Cervantes' question and consider the possibility that the imagination, when it has been shaped by a particular culture or a particular text, may be the faculty by which a man's world is made for him, rather than a faculty by which he makes new things out of an independently given world.

The several interior senses of the scholastic account are, in Hobbes, reduced to a single principle. All that happens in the mind is motion in the body. Sensation is motion caused by external bodies pressing upon the organs; imagination is that same motion continuing after the object has been removed, and growing weaker as other motions come to obscure it. Imagination is therefore nothing but decaying sense, and memory is not a second power but the same thing considered under another aspect. When we regard the image itself, we call it imagination; when we regard the fading of it, and thereby signify that the sense is old and past, we call it memory. Much experience, on this usage, is nothing but much memory, and the words are said to have divers names for divers considerations rather than for divers things.

The reduction is pressed deliberately against the tradition it displaces. Hobbes will admit no forms received without matter, no species impressed upon a faculty, and no immaterial storehouse. What the schools called the common sense, the estimative power, and the memorative power are, in his account, patterns in one mechanical process. He allows, however, that the decay of sense in waking men is not the decay of the motion made in sense but an obscuring of it, as the stars are obscured by the light of the sun and not extinguished. This qualification matters, since it permits him to explain why images which seem lost return in sleep, when the competing motions of present sensation are absent, and why dreams are compounded of the day's impressions in disordered arrangements.

From these beginnings Hobbes derives his account of the train of imaginations, which later writers call the association of ideas. One thought succeeds another not by chance but in the order in which the corresponding motions once succeeded one another in sense. He gives the instance of a man who, in a discourse of the civil war, asked what was the value of a Roman penny, the sequence running from the war to the delivering up of Charles, thence to the delivering up of Christ, and thence to the thirty pence. Trains of thought which are regulated by a desire or design he calls prudence, which is the presumption of the future drawn from the experience of the past. Whether such foresight amounts to knowledge, or only to a well-grounded conjecture, is a question taken up under the ideas of Experience and of Prudence.

The account leaves nothing of memory and imagination that is not sensory residue and its motions. Locke and Hume both proceed from a similar basis, though each finds it necessary to add distinctions that Hobbes suppressed: Locke by separating retention from the further perception that one has had the idea before, and Hume by distinguishing memory from imagination through the vivacity of the ideas and the fixity of their order. Whether the difference between remembering and merely imagining can be stated in terms of degree alone, as this line of thought requires, is the difficulty which Hume in the end concedes rather than resolves.

Locke treats memory under the general head of retention, which is one of the powers the mind exercises upon the simple ideas it has received from sensation and reflection. Retention is of two sorts. To keep an idea before the mind, which was brought in by sense or reflection and has not yet been let go, he calls contemplation. To revive an idea which has disappeared, and which the mind has been without, he calls memory. To this revival something further must be added if it is to be memory and not merely a fresh perception: the mind, in reviving the idea, has withal a perception that it has had the idea before. Without this backward reference the idea would present itself as new. The account is thus close to the older distinction between the retention of forms and the recognition of them as past, though Locke declines to assign these to distinct powers.

The metaphor of the repository is one Locke uses and then withdraws. The laying up of ideas in the memory signifies no more than that the mind has a power in many cases to revive perceptions which it once had; and he adds that our ideas are nothing but actual perceptions in the mind, which cease to be anything when there is no perception of them. The storehouse, on this view, holds nothing between the acts of remembering. What determines whether an idea can be revived is the strength of the original impression, the frequency with which it has been renewed, and the degree of attention given to it. Ideas imprinted by pleasure and pain, which the mind takes care to preserve for the direction of conduct, hold longer than those imprinted by indifferent occasions. Others fade until nothing is left but the memory that there once was such an idea.

Locke dwells on the imperfection of the faculty at some length, comparing minds in which ideas are quickly lodged and quickly lost to those in which they are received slowly and retained well. He notes also that the ideas of childhood often die before the man does, so that the mind is presented with the tombs to which it is approaching. Two questions follow which he treats elsewhere and which the tradition takes up. The first is whether a memory which alters what it revives can be the basis of knowledge of the past. The second is his own use of consciousness and memory to define personal identity, a doctrine considered under the idea of Man, and one which invites the objection that the self would then be no more continuous than the recollection of it.

Locke's account supplies the terms in which the eighteenth century conducts the discussion. Hume adopts the derivation of all mental content from impressions, but replaces Locke's added perception of pastness with a difference in the force and liveliness of the ideas themselves. Kant, taking the same materials, denies that the mind's associative habits can account for the unity of experience, and assigns to imagination a synthesizing office which neither Locke nor Hume had required of it.

Hume divides all the perceptions of the mind into impressions and ideas, the first being those which enter with most force and violence, the second the faint copies of these in thinking and reasoning. Memory and imagination both deal in ideas, and are distinguished from one another in two respects. An impression, when it makes its appearance again as an idea, may retain a considerable degree of its first vivacity, in which case the faculty is memory; or it may lose that vivacity entirely, in which case the faculty is imagination. The second difference concerns order. Memory is in a manner tied down to the order and position of the original impressions, whereas the imagination is at liberty to transpose and change them as it pleases. This liberty, however, has limits which Hume is careful to state. All the creative power of the mind amounts to no more than compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience. We can imagine a golden mountain because we have separately seen gold and a mountain.

The distinction bears upon the whole of Hume's account of belief. Belief is defined as a lively idea related to or associated with a present impression, so that what separates believing an event to have happened from merely conceiving it is not any additional idea but the manner of conception. Memory accordingly furnishes the beliefs we hold about the past, while imagination, unchecked, produces fictions. The transitions of the imagination are not arbitrary; they follow the principles of association, which Hume reduces to resemblance, contiguity in time and place, and cause and effect. These principles give the imagination a regularity which resembles reason without being reason, and it is upon them, rather than upon any demonstration, that the inference from past to future is said to rest.

The difficulty which the account carries with it is that vivacity admits of degrees. Hume grants that a memory may lose its force until it becomes indistinguishable from an idea of the imagination, and that a fiction repeated often enough may acquire such vivacity that it operates upon the mind as a memory does. If the two faculties differ only in the liveliness of their ideas and in a fidelity of order which cannot itself be checked except by another memory, then no mark internal to the perception distinguishes the true recollection from the well-established fancy. The consequences of this for the certainty of historical testimony are considered under the ideas of History and of Judgment.

By making memory and imagination continuous rather than distinct in kind, Hume sets the problem to which Kant's account of imagination is an answer. Kant does not dispute that the mind associates, but he denies that association can explain why experience has any order at all, and assigns to imagination a productive office prior to the associative one. James, working from the side of physiology rather than of critique, returns to something nearer Hume's position, treating the feeling of pastness which accompanies a memory as one psychological fact among others rather than as a guarantee.

Where the empiricists had treated imagination as a power exercised upon materials already given, Kant argues that no materials are given as experience until imagination has worked upon them. In the first edition of the Transcendental Deduction he describes a threefold synthesis. The synthesis of apprehension runs through and holds together the manifold of a single intuition. The synthesis of reproduction retains the earlier representations as the mind passes to the later, so that what has already been thought does not drop away. The synthesis of recognition brings the whole under a concept and so makes it the representation of an object. The second of these is expressly assigned to imagination, and Kant remarks that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself, a claim which the empiricists, who took perception to be given and imagination to come after, had no occasion to make.

The distinction between the reproductive and the productive imagination follows from this. Reproductive imagination recalls and reassembles past representations according to the laws of association, and is the faculty Hume described; Kant regards it as belonging to psychology and as presupposing a lawfulness in appearances which it cannot itself supply. Productive imagination is transcendental, and its office is to generate the temporal determinations through which the pure concepts of the understanding can be applied to what is given in sense. Since the categories and the intuitions are heterogeneous, a third thing is required which shares something with each. This is the schema, which is neither a concept nor an image but a rule for the production of images, and which Kant says is in itself always a product of imagination.

The doctrine has consequences beyond the theory of knowledge. In the Critique of Judgment the free play of imagination with the understanding is made the ground of the judgment of taste, and the failure of imagination to comprehend a magnitude in one intuition is made the occasion of the sublime. In the account of the moral law, by contrast, imagination has no such office, since the law is not schematized in time. What imagination can and cannot present is therefore a boundary within Kant's system as well as a condition of it, and the matters here touched are treated more fully under the ideas of Beauty and of Judgment.

Kant calls the transcendental imagination a blind but indispensable function of the soul, and an art concealed in the depths of the human soul whose real modes of operation nature is unlikely to allow us to discover. The remark indicates how far the question has moved from the storehouse of images with which the discussion began. Whether the synthesis Kant describes is a fact about the mind, to be investigated by psychology, or a condition of experience which no psychology could establish, is disputed by his successors, and the question of what such a faculty is and how it may be known belongs to the discussions of Mind and of Metaphysics.

The problem of retention, which the older writers stated in the metaphor of the storehouse, James proposes to solve in terms of the nervous system. The brain is plastic, and every excitation leaves in it a pathway which is more easily traversed on later occasions. Retention, on this account, is not the holding of an image somewhere out of consciousness but a physiological condition, a set of paths whose existence between the occasions of recall requires no mental existence at all. Recall is the retracing of such a path. James is aware that the difficulty is not thereby removed so much as transferred, and others have observed that the question of how matter retains is no easier than the question of how mind retains. What the transfer does accomplish is to bring memory within the reach of experiment, and James reports at length the researches of Ebbinghaus, whose nonsense syllables were devised to measure retention while excluding the associations that ordinary words carry with them.

The account brings memory into close relation with habit, which James treats in the same physiological terms. If the plasticity of neural matter explains the formation of habits, and its retentiveness explains their persistence during disuse, then reciting a poem learned in youth and skating after years away from the ice are much the same sort of performance. Aquinas had separated these, restricting memory to acts of knowledge referring to the past and assigning the recitation to habit; James finds the separation unnecessary. He does distinguish primary memory, the lingering awareness of what has just passed and which has not yet dropped out of the present, from secondary memory, which is the revival of a state that has been absent from consciousness altogether. Only the second, on his view, is remembering in the full sense, since it requires the reactivation of a dormant path.

Two further points bear on the older disputes. The first concerns the conditions of good recall, which James finds in the number and firmness of a fact's associations rather than in any general strength of the faculty; a fact tied to many others is retrievable by many routes. The second concerns the mark by which memory is known. What distinguishes remembering from imagining is a feeling of warmth and intimacy, of the object's belonging to one's own past. James treats this as a psychological fact and not as a guarantee, and cites cases in which the feeling attaches to what was only heard about and never undergone. On the question of the generic image he denies that any image can be abstract or universal, since a blurred thing is as particular as a sharp one, and what makes either generic is its being felt with a representative function.

James accounts for forgetting as the fading of paths insufficiently reinforced, and treats the amount forgotten as a function of the strength of the original impression and the interval since. Freud proposes a different cause for a different class of cases, holding that the material most likely to be lost to recall may be the material most vividly impressed, when what was impressed cannot be admitted to consciousness. Whether the two explanations are rivals or apply to different kinds of forgetting is a question which the subsequent literature has not settled, and which touches the discussions of Emotion and of Medicine.

Freud approaches forgetting from a side which the tradition had largely left unexamined. Where the older accounts explained the failure of recall by the weakening of an impression over time, he holds that a great part of what cannot be remembered is held out of consciousness by an active force. A wish arises which is in sharp opposition to the other desires of the individual, and which cannot be reconciled with the ethical and aesthetic pretensions of his personality; the idea that bears this wish is repressed, and forgotten. The material so treated is not below the threshold of recall in the ordinary sense, since no lapse of time has weakened it. It may be revived with considerable vividness once the emotional obstacle is removed, which is what the analytic procedure, described at its inception as a talking cure, undertakes to do. Augustine had argued that what seems forgotten remains in the memory, or we could not so much as look for it; Freud assigns a cause to the concealment, and a method for undoing it.

The extension of the doctrine reaches from the traumas of early life to the commonest occurrences. The forgetting of a familiar name, the mislaying of an object, the slip of the tongue, are treated as instances of the same obliviscence of the disagreeable rather than as accidents. The contents of memory are accordingly not a transparent record. Freud describes screen memories, recollections of childhood which are unusually vivid and unusually trivial, and which he interprets as substitutes standing in front of what has been excluded. What is most clearly remembered may be what is doing the work of concealment.

The account of imagination follows the same lines. Dreams are held to be, in their manifest content, distorted substitutes for latent thoughts, the distortion being the work of a censorship directed against wish-impulses which the dreamer will not acknowledge. The mechanisms of condensation, displacement, and symbolization are the means of the disguise, and the recurrence of certain images across the dreams of many persons gives them, in Freud's view, the character of conventional symbols. Aristotle had assigned the content of dreams to slight stimulations of the sense organs, and Lucretius to the occupations of waking life; Freud does not deny these as sources of material but holds that the material is arranged by desire. Waking fantasy is treated as a compromise of the same kind, and artistic production as the redirection of energies which find in it a permitted channel, a doctrine considered under the ideas of Art and Desire.

If the theory is sound, memory can no longer be treated as a faculty which merely retains and revives, since what it retains and what it yields up are determined by interests of which the rememberer is unaware. Objections have been raised against the evidence on which the theory rests, and against the interpretation of dreams in particular, some holding with Jocasta that many men before now have so fared in dreams without any such meaning being required. What has survived the disputes over the psychoanalytic system is the proposition that remembering and forgetting serve purposes besides the keeping of an accurate record, and that the mind may have reasons for its lapses. The bearing of this upon responsibility and self-knowledge belongs to the discussions of Will and of Mind.