ABSTRACT
After the publication of the book to which this is an introduction, Doctor Semon’s work, as exemplified in the fragment Bewusstseinsvorgang und Gehirnprozess, published posthumously in 1920, became specially concerned with the correlation of psychical and physiological processes. But even more (in Der Stand der Frage nach Vererbung erworbener Eigenschaften, 1911) with evidence and arguments in favour of the thesis which he had taken over from Hering and shared with Samuel Butler, to the effect that Mneme (or as they had called it Memory) was a property of all living matter, and that mnemic phenomena could therefore account for bodily inheritance and for phylogenetic similarities, as much as for memory in the literal acceptation of the word, and for the psychical processes built up by engraphy and ecphory, and their subordinate categories. And in view of the present attitude of biologists towards the alleged transmission of individually acquired modifications, I cannot but regret the time which my friend bestowed upon this subject. Or, rather, regret the time which this nowadays apparently hopeless thesis took away from a continued examination of the purely psychological aspects of mneme to which he often alluded as mnemic pathology. For time, which he spent with the unstintingness of his singularly accurate and minute modes of thought, was refused him and his work. Not merely because Richard Semon’s life was cut short by his own hand at the age of fifty-nine, but even more because a series of calamities—the long, hopeless illness of his wife, the solitude in which he was left by her death, 27and the despair of witnessing his country’s downfall—would seem to have sapped his intellectual vitality before their united strain drove him to suicide. Though whether, had he found strength to live, he would ever have recovered his interest in work seems to me doubtful in the present plight both of Germany and of German science. Be this as it may, the psychological part of his work remains, however highly elaborated, a fragment—a fragment, however, whose shape and substance are so suggestive that I cannot but think that a part of Semon’s importance may consist in what will be added by others to the work he has left unfinished. His ideas seem to go far beyond his own writings, especially in the field of what Mr. Kirkpatrick calls genetic psychology. And already his ideas seem to put a connection through the facts and hypotheses brought forward by others. I shall therefore attempt, in however sketchy and amateurish a fashion, to point out and unite together some applications of mnemic principles which seem implicit but disconnected in the works of some other recent psychologists.
