James Mark Baldwin (1861-1934) Mental Development in the Child and the Race (1897)
Part II: Biological Genesis
Chapter 9: Organic Imitation
3. The Physical Basis of Memory and Association
...Memory is, as everybody says, on the bodily side, the reinstatement in the nervous centres of the processes concerned in the original perception, sensation, etc., or of others that stand for them. These processes, of course, tend always, when started, to issue in movement, just the same, no matter how they themselves are started. So the function of the reinstatement of processes in the act of memory is, in respect to the tendency to action which these processes arouse, essentially the same as that of the processes of perception, sensation, or other event which furnished the original of the memory.
But in memory the object or thing remembered is itself absent; yet inasmuch as its proper reaction in movement comes about just the same, we have a new stage in what is still our old friend the 'circular,' the 'stimulus-retaining,' reaction. It gets started from the brain centres to be sure, but it aims, just the same, to bring about the consequences which it did when it was directly started by the sense-stimulation. It aims, that is, to bring the organism into touch with the stimulation itself again if it be a desirable one, or, in contrary cases, to get the organism away from the stimulation.
Chapter 9: Organic Imitation
3. The Physical Basis of Memory and Association
...Memory is, as everybody says, on the bodily side, the reinstatement in the nervous centres of the processes concerned in the original perception, sensation, etc., or of others that stand for them. These processes, of course, tend always, when started, to issue in movement, just the same, no matter how they themselves are started. So the function of the reinstatement of processes in the act of memory is, in respect to the tendency to action which these processes arouse, essentially the same as that of the processes of perception, sensation, or other event which furnished the original of the memory.
But in memory the object or thing remembered is itself absent; yet inasmuch as its proper reaction in movement comes about just the same, we have a new stage in what is still our old friend the 'circular,' the 'stimulus-retaining,' reaction. It gets started from the brain centres to be sure, but it aims, just the same, to bring about the consequences which it did when it was directly started by the sense-stimulation. It aims, that is, to bring the organism into touch with the stimulation itself again if it be a desirable one, or, in contrary cases, to get the organism away from the stimulation.