We are following a somewhat arbitrary order. Since each and every
faculty we possess is either in whole or in part a resultant of the play
of our associations, it would have been as natural, after treating of
association, to treat of memory as to treat of interest and attention
next. But, since we did take the latter operations first, we must take
memory now without farther delay; for the phenomena of memory are among
the simplest and most immediate consequences of the fact that our mind
is essentially an associating machine. There is no more pre-eminent
example for exhibiting the fertility of the laws of association as
principles of psychological analysis. Memory, moreover, is so important
a faculty in the schoolroom that you are probably waiting with some
eagerness to know what psychology has to say about it for your help.
In old times, if you asked a person to explain why he came to be
remembering at that moment some particular incident in his previous
life, the only reply he could make was that his soul is endowed with a
faculty called memory; that it is the inalienable function of this
faculty to recollect; and that, therefore, he necessarily at that moment
must have a cognition of that portion of the past. This explanation by a
'faculty' is one thing which explanation by association has superseded
altogether. If, by saying we have a faculty of memory, you mean nothing
more than the fact that we can remember, nothing more than an abstract
name for our power inwardly to recall the past, there is no harm done:
we do have the faculty; for we unquestionably have such a power. But if,
by faculty, you mean a principle of _explanation of our general power to
recall_, your psychology is empty. The associationist psychology, on the
other hand, gives an explanation of each particular fact of
recollection; and, in so doing, it also gives an explanation of the
general faculty. The 'faculty' of memory is thus no real or ultimate
explanation; for it is itself explained as a result of the association
of ideas.
Nothing is easier than to show you just what I mean by this. Suppose I
am silent for a moment, and then say in commanding accents: "Remember!
Recollect!" Does your faculty of memory obey the order, and reproduce
any definite image from your past? Certainly not. It stands staring into
vacancy, and asking, "What kind of a thing do you wish me to remember?"
It needs in short, a _cue_. But, if I say, remember the date of your
birth, or remember what you had for breakfast, or remember the
succession of notes in the musical scale; then your faculty of memory
immediately produces the required result: the _'cue'_ determines its
vast set of potentialities toward a particular point. And if you now
look to see how this happens, you immediately perceive that the cue is
something _contiguously associated_ with the thing recalled. The words,
'date of my birth,' have an ingrained association with a particular
number, month, and year; the words, 'breakfast this morning,' cut off
all other lines of recall except those which lead to coffee and bacon
and eggs; the words, 'musical scale,' are inveterate mental neighbors of
do, ré, mi, fa, sol, la, etc. The laws of association govern, in fact,
all the trains of our thinking which are not interrupted by sensations
breaking on us from without. Whatever appears in the mind must be
_introduced_; and, when introduced, it is as the associate of something
already there. This is as true of what you are recollecting as it is of
everything else you think of.
Reflection will show you that there are peculiarities in your memory
which would be quite whimsical and unaccountable if we were forced to
regard them as the product of a purely spiritual faculty. Were memory
such a faculty, granted to us solely for its practical use, we ought to
remember easiest whatever we most _needed_ to remember; and frequency of
repetition, recency, and the like, would play no part in the matter.
That we should best remember frequent things and recent things, and
forget things that are ancient or were experienced only once, could only
be regarded as an incomprehensible anomaly on such a view. But if we
remember because of our associations, and if these are (as the
physiological psychologists believe) due to our organized brain-paths,
we easily see how the law of recency and repetition should prevail.
Paths frequently and recently ploughed are those that lie most open,
those which may be expected most easily to lead to results. The laws of
our memory, as we find them, therefore are incidents of our
associational constitution; and, when we are emancipated from the
flesh, it is conceivable that they may no longer continue to obtain.
We may assume, then, that recollection is a resultant of our associative
processes, these themselves in the last analysis being most probably due
to the workings of our brain.
Descending more particularly into the faculty of memory, we have to
distinguish between its potential aspect as a magazine or storehouse and
its actual aspect as recollection now of a particular event. Our memory
contains all sorts of items which we do not now recall, but which we may
recall, provided a sufficient cue be offered. Both the general retention
and the special recall are explained by association. An educated memory
depends on an organized system of associations; and its goodness depends
on two of their peculiarities: first, on the persistency of the
associations; and, second, on their number.
Let us consider each of these points in turn.
First, the persistency of the associations. This gives what may be
called the _quality of native retentiveness_ to the individual. If, as I
think we are forced to, we consider the brain to be the organic
condition by which the vestiges of our experience are associated with
each other, we may suppose that some brains are 'wax to receive and
marble to retain.' The slightest impressions made on them abide. Names,
dates, prices, anecdotes, quotations, are indelibly retained, their
several elements fixedly cohering together, so that the individual soon
becomes a walking cyclopædia of information. All this may occur with no
philosophic tendency in the mind, no impulse to weave the materials
acquired into anything like a logical system. In the books of anecdotes,
and, more recently, in the psychology-books, we find recorded instances
of monstrosities, as we may call them, of this desultory memory; and
they are often otherwise very stupid men. It is, of course, by no means
incompatible with a philosophic mind; for mental characteristics have
infinite capacities for permutation. And, when both memory and
philosophy combine together in one person, then indeed we have the
highest sort of intellectual efficiency. Your Walter Scotts, your
Leibnitzes, your Gladstones, and your Goethes, all your folio copies of
mankind, belong to this type. Efficiency on a colossal scale would
indeed seem to require it. For, although your philosophic or systematic
mind without good desultory memory may know how to work out results and
recollect where in the books to find them, the time lost in the
searching process handicaps the thinker, and gives to the more ready
type of individual the economical advantage.
The extreme of the contrasted type, the type with associations of small
persistency, is found in those who have almost no desultory memory at
all. If they are also deficient in logical and systematizing power, we
call them simply feeble intellects; and no more need to be said about
them here. Their brain-matter, we may imagine, is like a fluid jelly, in
which impressions may be easily made, but are soon closed over again, so
that the brain reverts to its original indifferent state.
But it may occur here, just as in other gelatinous substances, that an
impression will vibrate throughout the brain, and send waves into other
parts of it. In cases of this sort, although the immediate impression
may fade out quickly, it does modify the cerebral mass; for the paths it
makes there may remain, and become so many avenues through which the
impression may be reproduced if they ever get excited again. And its
liability to reproduction will depend of course upon the variety of
these paths and upon the frequency with which they are used. Each path
is in fact an associated process, the number of these associates
becoming thus to a great degree a substitute for the independent
tenacity of the original impression. As I have elsewhere written: Each
of the associates is a hook to which it hangs, a means to fish it up
when sunk below the surface. Together they form a network of attachments
by which it is woven into the entire tissue of our thought. The 'secret
of a good memory' is thus the secret of forming diverse and multiple
associations with every fact we care to retain. But this forming of
associations with a fact,--what is it but thinking _about_ the fact as
much as possible? Briefly, then, of two men with the same outward
experiences, _the one who thinks over his experiences most_, and weaves
them into the most systematic relations with each other, will be the one
with the best memory.
But, if our ability to recollect a thing be so largely a matter of its
associations with other things which thus becomes its cues, an important
pædagogic consequence follows. _There can be no improvement of the
general or elementary faculty of memory: there can only be improvement
of our memory for special systems of associated things_; and this
latter improvement is due to the way in which the things in question are
woven into association with each other in the mind. Intricately or
profoundly woven, they are held: disconnected, they tend to drop out
just in proportion as the native brain retentiveness is poor. And no
amount of training, drilling, repeating, and reciting employed upon the
matter of one system of objects, the history-system, for example, will
in the least improve either the facility or the durability with which
objects belonging to a wholly disparate system--the system of facts of
chemistry, for instance--tend to be retained. That system must be
separately worked into the mind by itself,--a chemical fact which is
thought about in connection with the other chemical facts, tending then
to stay, but otherwise easily dropping out.
We have, then, not so much a faculty of memory as many faculties of
memory. We have as many as we have systems of objects habitually thought
of in connection with each other. A given object is held in the memory
by the associates it has acquired within its own system exclusively.
Learning the facts of another system will in no wise help it to stay in
the mind, for the simple reason that it has no 'cues' within that other
system.
We see examples of this on every hand. Most men have a good memory for
facts connected with their own pursuits. A college athlete, who remains
a dunce at his books, may amaze you by his knowledge of the 'records' at
various feats and games, and prove himself a walking dictionary of
sporting statistics. The reason is that he is constantly going over
these things in his mind, and comparing and making series of them. They
form for him, not so many odd facts, but a concept-system, so they
stick. So the merchant remembers prices, the politician other
politicians' speeches and votes, with a copiousness which astonishes
outsiders, but which the amount of thinking they bestow on these
subjects easily explains.
The great memory for facts which a Darwin or a Spencer reveal in their
books is not incompatible with the possession on their part of a mind
with only a middling degree of physiological retentiveness. Let a man
early in life set himself the task of verifying such a theory as that of
evolution, and facts will soon cluster and cling to him like grapes to
their stem. Their relations to the theory will hold them fast; and, the
more of these the mind is able to discern, the greater the erudition
will become. Meanwhile the theorist may have little, if any, desultory
memory. Unutilizable facts may be unnoted by him, and forgotten as soon
as heard. An ignorance almost as encyclopedic as his erudition may
coexist with the latter, and hide, as it were, within the interstices of
its web. Those of you who have had much to do with scholars and
_savants_ will readily think of examples of the class of mind I mean.
The best possible sort of system into which to weave an object,
mentally, is a _rational_ system, or what is called a 'science.' Place
the thing in its pigeon-hole in a classificatory series; explain it
logically by its causes, and deduce from it its necessary effects; find
out of what natural law it is an instance,--and you then know it in the
best of all possible ways. A 'science' is thus the greatest of
labor-saving contrivances. It relieves the memory of an immense number
of details, replacing, as it does, merely contiguous associations by the
logical ones of identity, similarity, or analogy. If you know a 'law,'
you may discharge your memory of masses of particular instances, for the
law will reproduce them for you whenever you require them. The law of
refraction, for example: If you know that, you can with a pencil and a
bit of paper immediately discern how a convex lens, a concave lens, or a
prism, must severally alter the appearance of an object. But, if you
don't know the general law, you must charge your memory separately with
each of the three kinds of effect.
A 'philosophic' system, in which all things found their rational
explanation and were connected together as causes and effects, would be
the perfect mnemonic system, in which the greatest economy of means
would bring about the greatest richness of results. So that, if we have
poor desultory memories, we can save ourselves by cultivating the
philosophic turn of mind.
There are many artificial systems of mnemonics, some public, some sold
as secrets. They are all so many devices for training us into certain
methodical and stereotyped _ways of thinking_ about the facts we seek to
retain. Even were I competent, I could not here go into these systems in
any detail. But a single example, from a popular system, will show what
I mean. I take the number-alphabet, the great mnemonic device for
recollecting numbers and dates. In this system each digit is
represented by a consonant, thus: 1 is _t_ or _d_; 2, _n_; 3, _m_; 4,
_r_; 5, _l_; 6, _sh, j, ch_, or _g_; 7, _c, k, g_, or _qu_; 8, _f_ or
_v_; 9, _b_ or _p_; 0, _s, c_, or _z_. Suppose, now, you wish to
remember the velocity of sound, 1,142 feet a second: _t, t, r, n_, are
the letters you must use. They make the consonants of _tight run_, and
it would be a 'tight run' for you to keep up such a speed. So 1649, the
date of the execution of Charles I., may be remembered by the word
_sharp_, which recalls the headsman's axe.
Apart from the extreme difficulty of finding words that are appropriate
in this exercise, it is clearly an excessively poor, trivial, and silly
way of 'thinking' about dates; and the way of the historian is much
better. He has a lot of landmark-dates already in his mind. He knows the
historic concatenation of events, and can usually place an event at its
right date in the chronology-table, by thinking of it in a rational way,
referring it to its antecedents, tracing its concomitants and
consequences, and thus ciphering out its date by connecting it with
theirs. The artificial memory-systems, recommending, as they do, such
irrational methods of thinking, are only to be recommended for the first
landmarks in a system, or for such purely detached facts as enjoy no
rational connection with the rest of our ideas. Thus the student of
physics may remember the order of the spectral colours by the word
_vibgyor_ which their initial letters make. The student of anatomy may
remember the position of the Mitral valve on the Left side of the heart
by thinking that L.M. stands also for 'long meter' in the hymn-books.
You now see why 'cramming' must be so poor a mode of study. Cramming
seeks to stamp things in by intense application immediately before the
ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form but few associations. On the
other hand, the same thing recurring on different days, in different
contexts, read, recited on, referred to again and again, related to
other things and reviewed, gets well wrought into the mental structure.
This is the reason why you should enforce on your pupils habits of
continuous application. There is no moral turpitude in cramming. It
would be the best, because the most economical, mode of study if it led
to the results desired. But it does not, and your older pupils can
readily be made to see the reason why.
It follows also, from what has been said, that _the popular idea that
'the Memory,' in the sense of a general elementary faculty, can be
improved by training, is a great mistake_. Your memory for facts of a
certain class can be improved very much by training in that class of
facts, because the incoming new fact will then find all sorts of
analogues and associates already there, and these will keep it liable to
recall. But other kinds of fact will reap none of that benefit, and,
unless one have been also trained and versed in _their_ class, will be
at the mercy of the mere crude retentiveness of the individual, which,
as we have seen, is practically a fixed quantity. Nevertheless, one
often hears people say: "A great sin was committed against me in my
youth: my teachers entirely failed to exercise my memory. If they had
only made me learn a lot of things by heart at school, I should not be,
as I am now, forgetful of everything I read and hear." This is a great
mistake: learning poetry by heart will make it easier to learn and
remember other poetry, but nothing else; and so of dates; and so of
chemistry and geography.
But, after what I have said, I am sure you will need no farther argument
on this point; and I therefore pass it by.
But, since it has brought me to speak of learning things by heart, I
think that a general practical remark about verbal memorizing may now
not be out of place. The excesses of old-fashioned verbal memorizing,
and the immense advantages of object-teaching in the earlier stages of
culture, have perhaps led those who philosophize about teaching to an
unduly strong reaction; and learning things by heart is now probably
somewhat too much despised. For, when all is said and done, the fact
remains that verbal material is, on the whole, the handiest and most
useful material in which thinking can be carried on. Abstract
conceptions are far and away the most economical instruments of thought,
and abstract conceptions are fixed and incarnated for us in words.
Statistical inquiry would seem to show that, as men advance in life,
they tend to make less and less use of visual images, and more and more
use of words. One of the first things that Mr. Galton discovered was
that this appeared to be the case with the members of the Royal Society
whom he questioned as to their mental images. I should say, therefore,
that constant exercise in verbal memorizing must still be an
indispensable feature in all sound education. Nothing is more
deplorable than that inarticulate and helpless sort of mind that is
reminded by everything of some quotation, case, or anecdote, which it
cannot now exactly recollect. Nothing, on the other hand, is more
convenient to its possessor, or more delightful to his comrades, than a
mind able, in telling a story, to give the exact words of the dialogue
or to furnish a quotation accurate and complete. In every branch of
study there are happily turned, concise, and handy formulas which in an
incomparable way sum up results. The mind that can retain such formulas
is in so far a superior mind, and the communication of them to the pupil
ought always to be one of the teacher's favorite tasks.
In learning 'by heart,' there are, however, efficient and inefficient
methods; and, by making the pupil skilful in the best method, the
teacher can both interest him and abridge the task. The best method is
of course not to 'hammer in' the sentences, by mere reiteration, but to
analyze them, and think. For example, if the pupil should have to learn
this last sentence, let him first strip out its grammatical core, and
learn, "The best method is not to hammer in, but to analyze," and then
add the amplificative and restrictive clauses, bit by bit, thus: "The
best method is of course not to hammer in _the sentences_, but to
analyze _them and think_." Then finally insert the words '_by mere
reiteration_,' and the sentence is complete, and both better understood
and quicker remembered than by a more purely mechanical method.
* * * * *
In conclusion, I must say a word about the contributions to
our knowledge of memory which have recently come from the
laboratory-psychologists. Many of the enthusiasts for scientific or
brass-instrument child-study are taking accurate measurements of
children's elementary faculties, and among these what we may call
_immediate memory_ admits of easy measurement. All we need do is to
exhibit to the child a series of letters, syllables, figures, pictures,
or what-not, at intervals of one, two, three, or more seconds, or to
sound a similar series of names at the same intervals, within his
hearing, and then see how completely he can reproduce the list, either
directly, or after an interval of ten, twenty, or sixty seconds, or some
longer space of time. According to the results of this exercise, the
pupils may be rated in a memory-scale; and some persons go so far as to
think that the teacher should modify her treatment of the child
according to the strength or feebleness of its faculty as thus made
known.
Now I can only repeat here what I said to you when treating of
attention: man is too complex a being for light to be thrown on his real
efficiency by measuring any one mental faculty taken apart from its
consensus in the working whole. Such an exercise as this, dealing with
incoherent and insipid objects, with no logical connection with each
other, or practical significance outside of the 'test,' is an exercise
the like of which in real life we are hardly ever called upon to
perform. In real life, our memory is always used in the service of some
interest: we remember things which we care for or which are associated
with things we care for; and the child who stands at the bottom of the
scale thus experimentally established might, by dint of the strength of
his passion for a subject, and in consequence of the logical association
into which he weaves the actual materials of his experience, be a very
effective memorizer indeed, and do his school-tasks on the whole much
better than an immediate parrot who might stand at the top of the
'scientifically accurate' list.
This preponderance of interest, of passion, in determining the results
of a human being's working life, obtains throughout. No elementary
measurement, capable of being performed in a laboratory, can throw any
light on the actual efficiency of the subject; for the vital thing about
him, his emotional and moral energy and doggedness, can be measured by
no single experiment, and becomes known only by the total results in the
long run. A blind man like Huber, with his passion for bees and ants,
can observe them through other people's eyes better than these can
through their own. A man born with neither arms nor legs, like the late
Kavanagh, M.P.--and what an icy heart his mother must have had about him
in his babyhood, and how 'negative' would the laboratory-measurements of
his motor-functions have been!--can be an adventurous traveller, an
equestrian and sportsman, and lead an athletic outdoor life. Mr. Romanes
studied the elementary rate of apperception in a large number of persons
by making them read a paragraph as fast as they could take it in, and
then immediately write down all they could reproduce of its contents. He
found astonishing differences in the rapidity, some taking four times as
long as others to absorb the paragraph, and the swiftest readers being,
as a rule, the best immediate recollectors, too. But not,--and this is
my point,--_not_ the most _intellectually capable subjects_, as tested
by the results of what Mr. Romanes rightly names 'genuine' intellectual
work; for he tried the experiment with several highly distinguished men
in science and literature, and most of them turned out to be slow
readers.
In the light of all such facts one may well believe that the total
impression which a perceptive teacher will get of the pupil's condition,
as indicated by his general temper and manner, by the listlessness or
alertness, by the ease or painfulness with which his school work is
done, will be of much more value than those unreal experimental tests,
those pedantic elementary measurements of fatigue, memory, association,
and attention, etc., which are urged upon us as the only basis of a
genuinely scientific pedagogy. Such measurements can give us useful
information only when we combine them with observations made without
brass instruments, upon the total demeanor of the measured individual,
by teachers with eyes in their heads and common sense, and some feeling
for the concrete facts of human nature in their hearts.
Depend upon it, no one need be too much cast down by the discovery of
his deficiency in any elementary faculty of the mind. What tells in life
is the whole mind working together, and the deficiencies of any one
faculty can be compensated by the efforts of the rest. You can be an
artist without visual images, a reader without eyes, a mass of erudition
with a bad elementary memory. In almost any subject your passion for the
subject will save you. If you only care enough for a result, you will
almost certainly attain it. If you wish to be rich, you will be rich; if
you wish to be learned, you will be learned; if you wish to be good, you
will be good. Only you must, then, _really_ wish these things, and wish
them with exclusiveness, and not wish at the same time a hundred other
incompatible things just as strongly.
One of the most important discoveries of the 'scientific' sort that have
recently been made in psychology is that of Mr. Galton and others
concerning the great variations among individuals in the type of their
imagination. Every one is now familiar with the fact that human beings
vary enormously in the brilliancy, completeness, definiteness, and
extent of their visual images. These are singularly perfect in a large
number of individuals, and in a few are so rudimentary as hardly to
exist. The same is true of the auditory and motor images, and probably
of those of every kind; and the recent discovery of distinct brain-areas
for the various orders of sensation would seem to provide a physical
basis for such variations and discrepancies. The facts, as I said, are
nowadays so popularly known that I need only remind you of their
existence. They might seem at first sight of practical importance to the
teacher; and, indeed, teachers have been recommended to sort their
pupils in this way, and treat them as the result falls out. You should
interrogate them as to their imagery, it is said, or exhibit lists of
written words to their eyes, and then sound similar lists in their ears,
and see by which channel a child retains most words. Then, in dealing
with that child, make your appeals predominantly through that channel.
If the class were very small, results of some distinctness might
doubtless thus be obtained by a painstaking teacher. But it is obvious
that in the usual schoolroom no such differentiation of appeal is
possible; and the only really useful practical lesson that emerges from
this analytic psychology in the conduct of large schools is the lesson
already reached in a purely empirical way, that the teacher ought
always to impress the class through as many sensible channels as he can.
Talk and write and draw on blackboard, permit the pupils to talk, and
make them write and draw, exhibit pictures, plans, and curves, have your
diagrams colored differently in their different parts, etc.; and out of
the whole variety of impressions the individual child will find the most
lasting ones for himself. In all primary school work this principle of
multiple impressions is well recognized, so I need say no more about it
here.
This principle of multiplying channels and varying associations and
appeals is important, not only for teaching pupils to remember, but for
teaching them to understand. It runs, in fact, through the whole
teaching art.
One word about the unconscious and unreproducible part of our
acquisitions, and I shall have done with the topic of memory.
Professor Ebbinghaus, in a heroic little investigation into the laws of
memory which he performed a dozen or more years ago by the method of
learning lists of nonsense syllables, devised a method of measuring the
rate of our forgetfulness, which lays bare an important law of the mind.
His method was to read over his list until he could repeat it once by
heart unhesitatingly. The number of repetitions required for this was a
measure of the difficulty of the learning in each particular case. Now,
after having once learned a piece in this way, if we wait five minutes,
we find it impossible to repeat it again in the same unhesitating
manner. We must read it over again to revive some of the syllables,
which have already dropped out or got transposed. Ebbinghaus now
systematically studied the number of readings-over which were necessary
to revive the unhesitating recollection of the piece after five minutes,
half an hour, an hour, a day, a week, a month, had elapsed. The number
of rereadings required he took to be a measure of the _amount of
forgetting_ that had occurred in the elapsed interval. And he found some
remarkable facts. The process of forgetting, namely, is vastly more
rapid at first than later on. Thus full half of the piece seems to be
forgotten within the first half-hour, two-thirds of it are forgotten at
the end of eight hours, but only four-fifths at the end of a month. He
made no trials beyond one month of interval; but, if we ourselves
prolong ideally the curve of remembrance, whose beginning his
experiments thus obtain, it is natural to suppose that, no matter how
long a time might elapse, the curve would never descend quite so low as
to touch the zero-line. In other words, no matter how long ago we may
have learned a poem, and no matter how complete our inability to
reproduce it now may be, yet the first learning will still show its
lingering effects in the abridgment of the time required for learning it
again. In short, Professor Ebbinghaus's experiments show that things
which we are quite unable definitely to recall have nevertheless
impressed themselves, in some way, upon the structure of the mind. We
are different for having once learned them. The resistances in our
systems of brain-paths are altered. Our apprehensions are quickened. Our
conclusions from certain premises are probably not just what they would
be if those modifications were not there. The latter influence the whole
margin of our consciousness, even though their products, not being
distinctly reproducible, do not directly figure at the focus of the
field.
The teacher should draw a lesson from these facts. We are all too apt to
measure the gains of our pupils by their proficiency in directly
reproducing in a recitation or an examination such matters as they may
have learned, and inarticulate power in them is something of which we
always underestimate the value. The boy who tells us, "I know the
answer, but I can't say what it is," we treat as practically identical
with him who knows absolutely nothing about the answer at all. But this
is a great mistake. It is but a small part of our experience in life
that we are ever able articulately to recall. And yet the whole of it
has had its influence in shaping our character and defining our
tendencies to judge and act. Although the ready memory is a great
blessing to its possessor, the vaguer memory of a subject, of having
once had to do with it, of its neighborhood, and of where we may go to
recover it again, constitutes in most men and women the chief fruit of
their education. This is true even in professional education. The
doctor, the lawyer, are seldom able to decide upon a case off-hand. They
differ from other men only through the fact that they know how to get at
the materials for decision in five minutes or half an hour: whereas the
layman is unable to get at the materials at all, not knowing in what
books and indexes to look or not understanding the technical terms.
Be patient, then, and sympathetic with the type of mind that cuts a
poor figure in examinations. It may, in the long examination which life
sets us, come out in the end in better shape than the glib and ready
reproducer, its passions being deeper, its purposes more worthy, its
combining power less commonplace, and its total mental output
consequently more important.
Such are the chief points which it has seemed worth while for me to call
to your notice under the head of memory. We can sum them up for
practical purposes by saying that the art of remembering is the art of
_thinking_; and by adding, with Dr. Pick, that, when we wish to fix a
new thing in either our own mind or a pupil's, our conscious effort
should not be so much to _impress_ and _retain_ it as to _connect_ it
with something else already there. The connecting _is_ the thinking;
and, if we attend clearly to the connection, the connected thing will
certainly be likely to remain within recall.
I shall next ask you to consider the process by which we acquire new
knowledge,--the process of 'Apperception,' as it is called, by which we
receive and deal with new experiences, and revise our stock of ideas so
as to form new or improved conceptions.