ABSTRACT
By the greatest luck the very book wherein Mr. Bertrand Russell has introduced to the English reader as much of Semon’s ideas and terminology as answered the purposes of his Analysis of Mind, happens to contain a couple of sentences quite invaluable as a starting-point and a final goal for what I want to say in this preface. Besides justifying my new title of Mnemic Psychology, they will help me to deal with aspects or results of Semon’s work which did not fit into Mr. Bertrand Russell’s present programme, but which have great fascination for myself and, I should imagine, also for other students. The second of these two quotations from Mr. B. Russell I shall reserve for the end of this introduction, when I intend to flash it on my reader with considerable effect. The first quotation—the one to be used as my starting-point—is the one from p. 82 of the Analysis of Mind. By way of a “definition of mnemic phenomena,” Mr. B. Russell begins with a perhaps over-incontrovertible remark, only to bring into sharper relief a somewhat mysterious but, unless I misapprehend it, extraordinarily important statement: “A definition of mnemic phenomena,” he begins, “which did not include memory would of course be a bad one. The point of the definition is not that it includes memory, but that it includes it as one of a class of phenomena which embrace all that is characteristic in the subject-matter of psychology.”
