Key of Knowledge

SR No.: 006702
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: ZZZ Unknown
Publication Year: 1919
Total Pages: 1204
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 25 MB

Page 615

594
THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE.
What, then, is memory? Is it a store-house of facts and figures, as such, or a register or record of past experiences and events? That the past is preserved in the mind, in some form, is beyond dispute, since glimpses of it; are caught now and then even after a supposed obliteration. The wonderful memory of hypnotic subjects and men who have undergone the experience of drowning, suffices to prove the preservation of every event in the past.
Memory means nothing if not the recollection of a past event, i.e., the recurrence, in consciousness, of an experience already undergone, or of a sensation already felt. Hence, the difference between perception and recollection lies only in this that, while the excitation which occasions the former comes from without, that which brings the latter originates within the mind itself. When the causes of sensation lie outside the organism, mental images resulting from the reaction of mind go out to overlie them, and occasion visual perception ; but when they originate from within, they give rise to forms, which, finding nothing substantial, outside in the world, to feed upon, remain evanescent and fleeting—the shadowy ghosts of events, rather than actualities of perception.
Observation will show that the past is preserved in two entirely different ways, namely, firstly, in the form of modification of disposition or character, which, as we have seen, is the repository of education, and, secondly, in the form of motor mechanisms that are 'set in motion as a whole by an initial impulse, in a close system of automatic movements which succeed