Note to Chapters vii and viii.—I have left these chapters unaltered, but I will ask the reader to remember that I am not urging that the ideas criticised are not perfectly valid and even objectively necessary. I am condemning them so far as they are taken as ultimate answers to the question, What is Reality?
p. 65. I am not saying that we may not have a sense and even a rudimentary perception of passivity without having any perception of activity in the proper sense. The question, raised on p. 97, as to the possible absence of an outside not-self in activity, applies with its answer mutatis mutandis to passivity also.
pp. 72-4. See Note to p. 48.
p. 79. As to what is and is not individually necessary we are fortunately under the sway of beneficent illusion. The one necessary individual means usually the necessity for an individual more or less of the same kind. But there is no need to enlarge on this point except in answer to some view which would base a false theoretical conclusion on an attitude, natural and necessary in practice, but involving some illusion.
p. 83. On Memory compare the passages referred to in the Index. That Memory, in the ordinary sense of the word, is a special development of Reproduction I take to be beyond doubt, and that Reproduction, in its proper sense, is Redintegration through ideal identity is to my mind certain. The nature of the psychological difference between the memory of the past on one side, and on the other side the imagination of the same or the inference (proper) thereto, is a question, I venture to think, of no more than average difficulty. It seems to me, in comparison with the problem of Reproduction in general (including the perception of a series), to be neither very hard nor very important. It is a matter however which I cannot enter on here. I have discussed the subject of Memory in Mind, N.S. Nos. 30 and 66.
I would add here that to assume the infallibility of Memory as an ultimate postulate, seems to me wholly superfluous, to say nothing of its bringing us (as it does) into collision with indubitable facts. There is of course a general presumption that memory is to be trusted. But our warrant for this general presumption is in the end our criterion of a harmonious system. Our world is ordered most harmoniously by taking what is remembered as being in general remembered truly, whatever that is to mean. And this secondary character of memory’s validity is, I submit, the only view which can be reconciled with our actual logical practice.
Note to pp. 96-100. The view as to the perception of activity laid down in these pages has been criticised by Mr. Stout in his excellent work on Psychology, Vol. i, pp. 173-7. With regard to Mr. Stout’s own account I shall not venture to comment on it
