The mere recognition of an object does not imply the presence of a distinct representative or mnemonic image.

In point of fact, in so far as recognition is assimilation, it cannot be said to imply a _distinct_ act of memory at all.

It is only when similarity is perceived amid difference, only when the accompaniments or surroundings of the object as previously seen, differencing it from the object as now seen, are brought up to the mind that we may be said distinctly to recall the past.

And our state of mind in recognizing an object or person is commonly an alternation between these two acts of separating the mnemonic image from the percept and so recalling or recollecting the past, and fusing the image and the percept in what is specifically marked off as recognition.[113] Although I have spoken of memory as a reinstatement in representative form of external experience, the term must be understood to include every revival of a past experience, whether external or internal, which is recognized as a revival.

In a general way, the recallings of our internal feelings take place in close connection with the recollection of external circumstances or events, and so they may be regarded as largely conditioned by the laws of this second kind of reproduction.
The old conceptions of mind, which regarded every mental phenomenon as a manifestation of an occult spiritual substance, naturally led to the supposition that an act of recollection involves the continued, unbroken existence of the reproductive or mnemonic image in the hidden regions of the mind.