ABSTRACT
I have dealt hitherto with what seem to be illustrations and applications of mnemic psychology in the work of a psychologist, namely Ribot, who failed to grasp the importance of Semon’s system. I now pass to more such illustrations and applications on the part of other psychologists, who, for aught I know, had never so much as heard of it. I am not alluding to Mr. MacDougall’s explanations of everything by inherited (Semon would have said mnemic) instincts, which operate in such manner as to preserve the species while, at the same time, knocking on the head that ““Hedonistic” fallacy which is so offensive to latter-day moralists. The psychologists I am speaking of are, on the contrary, those, especially Lloyd Morgan, Kirkpatrick, and Thorndike, 1 who recognize in the pleasure-displeasure alternative a kind of subordinate, an individual, selective factor, without which “Natural Selection” might find much less either to foster or to eliminate: a more economical substitute, as Kirkpatrick puts it, for death.
