ABSTRACT
There is, said Carlyle in ‘Signs of the Times’, a science of Dynamics as well as of Mechanics. In contrast to the ever-increasing pursuit of a modern mechanical science well suited to explain the mere clockwork of human behaviour, the science of Dynamics, he argued, was an older way of knowing which addressed the mysterious energies and primary forces of man. This distinction between the dynamic and the explicable may all too easily become another of those simplified and mutually weakening alternatives beloved of late Romanticism, yet I shall argue that between Carlyle’s essay of 1829 and the work of Henri Bergson at the turn of the century, it remains particularly pertinent to the study of both the theory and the practical experience of memory in the nineteenth century.
