A Defence Of Idealism Author:May Sinclair Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: VITALISM I Shall be reminded that dangers and dilemmas would be avoided much more easily and surely if we would only consent to put memory where the phys... more »iologist puts it — in the brain-cells of the organism, and leave it there. This would certainly be one way out, if memory were really that simple affair of neural association fixed into habit which the physiologist takes it to be. But does not memory presuppose two things which are not simple — Space and Time ? Time for the order of events in memory, space for their juxtaposition ? It is not easy to see how any set of neural associations could yield either. Whether as presuppositions or as forms of arrangement (schemata), they stand, as it were, between memory and that hypothetical self, removing memory a stage farther yet from its supreme place as the first. Memory itself is so dependent on them that we can make no valid statement about it that does not take them into account; and it will be no use trying to show that personal identity is independent of memory unless we can show also that it is independent of space and time. And space and time draw with a large net. The view that M. Bergson has set forth in Sur les Donnees immediates de la Conscience and La Matiere et la Memoire does more to make clear the relations of Time, Space, and Memory than perhaps any philosophy before the day of Vitalism. This clearness is not altogether due to M. Bergson's metaphysical theory; for, as we shall see, that theory landshim in many hopeless contradictions by the way. But his view of time and space does not stand or fall with his theory of the Élan Vital; and, whatever the ultimate destiny of Vitalism may be, no metaphysic that comes after it can afford to ignore M. Bergson's really very singular view. It is mainly owing t...« less