thought--some of them familiar to the readers of the authors just
mentioned. We wish to remember something in the course of conversation.
No effort of the will can reach it; but we say, "Wait a minute, and it
will come to me," and go on talking. Presently, perhaps some minutes
later, the idea we are in search of comes all at once into the mind,
delivered like a prepaid bundle, laid at the door of consciousness like
a foundling in a basket. How it came there we know not. The mind must
have been at work groping and feeling for it in the dark: it cannot have
come of itself. Yet, all the while, our consciousness, so far as we are
conscious of our consciousness, was busy with other thoughts.
In old persons, there is sometimes a long interval of obscure mental
action before the answer to a question is evolved. I remember making an
inquiry of an ancient man, whom I met on the road in a waggon with his
daughter, about a certain old burial-ground which I was visiting. He
seemed to listen attentively; but I got no answer. "Wait half a minute
or so," the daughter said, "and he will tell you." And sure enough,
after a little time he answered me and to the point. The delay here,
probably, corresponded to what machinists call "lost time," or "back
lash" in turning an old screw, the thread of which is worn. But, within
a fortnight, I examined a young man for his degree in whom I noticed a
certain regular interval, and a pretty long one, between every question
and its answer. Yet the answer was, in almost every instance, correct,
when at last it did come. It was an idiosyncrasy, I found, which his
previous instructors had noticed. I do not think the mind knows what it
is doing in the interval, in such cases. This latent period, during
which the brain is obscurely at work, may, perhaps, belong to
mathematicians more than others. Swift said of Sir Isaac Newton that, if
one were to ask him a question, "he would revolve it in a circle in his
brain, round and round and round" (the narrator here describing a circle
on his own fore-head), "before he could produce an answer."
I have often spoken of the same trait in a distinguished friend of my
own, remarkable for his mathematical genius, and compared his sometimes
long-deferred answer to a question with half a dozen others stratified
over it, to the thawing out of the frozen words as told of by Baron
Munchausen and Rabelais, and nobody knows how many others before them.
I was told, within a week, of a business man in Boston, who, having an
important question under consideration, had given it up for the time as
too much for him. But he was conscious of an action going on in his
brain which was so unusual and painful as to excite his apprehensions
that he was threatened with palsy, or something of that sort. After some
hours of this uneasiness, his perplexity was all at once cleared up by
the natural solution of his doubt coming to him--worked out, as he
believed, in that obscure and troubled interval.
The cases are numerous where questions have been answered, or problems
solved, in dreams, or during unconscious sleep. Two of our most
distinguished professors in this institution have had such an
experience, as they tell me; and one of them has often assured me that
he never dreams. Somnambulism and double-consciousness offer another
series of illustrations. Many of my audience remember a murder case,
where the accused was successfully defended, on the ground of
somnambulism, by one of the most brilliant of American lawyers. In the
year 1686 a brother of Lord Culpepper was indicted at the Old Bailey for
shooting one of the guards and acquitted on the same ground of
somnambulism; that is an unconscious and, therefore, irresponsible state
of activity.
A more familiar instance of unconscious action is to be found in what we
call "absent" persons--those who, while wide awake, act with an apparent
purpose, but without really knowing what they are doing; as in La
Bruyère's character, who threw his glass of wine into the backgammon
board and swallowed the dice.
There are a vast number of movements which we perform with
perfect regularity while we are thinking of something quite
different--"automatic actions of the secondary kind," as Hartley calls
them, and of which he gives various examples. The old woman knits; the
young woman stitches, or perhaps plays her piano and yet talks away as
if nothing but her tongue were busy. Two lovers stroll along side by
side, just born into the rosy morning of their new life, prattling the
sweet follies worth all the wisdom that years will ever bring them. How
much do they think about that wonderful problem of balanced progression
which they solve anew at every step?
We are constantly finding results of unperceived mental processes in our
consciousness. Here is a striking instance, which I borrow from a recent
number of an English journal. It relates to what is considered the most
interesting period of incubation in Sir William Rowan Hamilton's
discovery of quaternions. The time was the 15th of October, 1843. On
that day, he says in a letter to a friend, he was walking from his
observatory to Dublin with Lady Hamilton, when, on reaching Brougham
Bridge, he "felt the galvanic circle of thought close; and the sparks
that fell from it were the fundamental relations between i, j, k," just
as he used them ever afterwards.
Still another instance of the spontaneous evolution of thought we may
find in the experience of a great poet. When Goethe shut his eyes and
pictured a flower to himself, he says that it developed itself before
him in leaves and blossoms. The result of the mental process appeared as
pictured thought; but the process itself was automatic and
imperceptible.
There are thoughts that never emerge into consciousness, which yet make
their influence felt among the perceptible mental currents, just as the
unseen planets sway the movements of those which are watched and mapped
by the astronomer. Old prejudices that are ashamed to confess themselves
nudge our talking thought to utter their magisterial veto. In hours of
languor, as Mr. Lecky has remarked in his "History of Rationalism," the
beliefs and fancies of obsolete conditions are apt to take advantage of
us. We know very little of the contents of our minds until some sudden
jar brings them to light, as an earthquake that shakes down a miser's
house brings out the old stockings full of gold and all the hoards that
have been hidden away in holes and crannies.
We not rarely find our personality doubled in our dreams and do battle
with ourselves, unconscious that we are our own antagonists. Dr. Johnson
dreamed that he had a contest of wit with an opponent, and got the worst
of it: of course he furnished the wit for both. Tartini heard the Devil
play a wonderful sonata and set it down on waking. Who was the Devil but
Tartini himself? I remember, in my youth, reading verses in a dream,
written, as I thought, by a rival fledgling of the Muse. They were so
far beyond my powers that I despaired of equalling them; yet I must have
made them unconsciously as I read them. Could I only have remembered
them waking!
But I must here add another personal experience, of which I will say
beforehand--somewhat as honest Isaak Walton said of his pike, "This dish
of meat is too good for any but anglers or honest men"--this story is
good only for philosophers and very small children. I will merely hint
to the former class of thinkers, that its moral bears on two points:
first, the value of our self-estimate, sleeping--possibly, also, waking;
secondly, the significance of general formulæ when looked at in certain
exalted mental conditions.
I once inhaled a pretty full dose of ether, with the determination to
put on record, at the earliest moment of regaining consciousness, the
thought I should find uppermost in my mind. The mighty music of the
triumphal march into nothingness reverberated through my brain, and
filled me with a sense of infinite possibilities, which made me an
archangel for the moment. The veil of eternity was lifted. The one great
truth which underlies all human experience and is the key to all the
mysteries that philosophy has sought in vain to solve, flashed upon me
in a sudden revelation. Henceforth all was clear: a few words had lifted
my intelligence to the level of the knowledge of the cherubim. As my
natural condition returned, I remembered my resolution; and, staggering
to my desk, I wrote, in ill-shaped, straggling characters, the all
embracing truth still glimmering in my consciousness. The words were
these (children may smile; the wise will ponder): "_A strong smell of
turpentine prevails throughout._"
My digression has served at least to illustrate the radical change which
a slight material cause may produce in our thoughts, and the way we
think about them. If the state just described were prolonged, it would
be called insanity. I have no doubt that there are many ill-organized
perhaps over-organized human brains, to which the common air is what the
vapour of ether was to mine: it is madness to them to drink in this
terrible burning oxygen at every breath; and the atmosphere that enfolds
them is like the flaming shirt of Nessus.
The more we examine the mechanism of thought, the more we shall see that
the automatic, unconscious action of the mind enters largely into all
its processes. Our definite ideas are stepping-stones; how we get from
one to the other, we do not know: something carries us; we do not take
the step. A creating and informing spirit which is with us, and not of
us, is recognized everywhere in real and storied life. It is the Zeus
that kindled the rage of Achilles; it is the muse of Homer; it is the
Daimon of Socrates; it is the inspiration of the seer; it is the mocking
devil that whispers to Margaret as she kneels at the altar; and the
hobgoblin that cried, "Sell him, sell him!" in the ear of John Bunyan:
it shaped the forms that filled the soul of Michael Angelo when he saw
the figure of the great Lawgiver in the yet unhewn marble, and the dome
of the world's yet unbuilt basilica against the black horizon; it comes
to the least of us, as a voice that will be heard; it tells us what we
must believe; it frames our sentences; it lends a sudden gleam of sense
or eloquence to the dullest of us all, so that, like Katterfelto with
his hair on end, we wonder at ourselves, or rather not at ourselves, but
at this divine visitor, who chooses our brain as his dwelling-place, and
invests our naked thought with the purple of the kings of speech or
song.
After all, the mystery of unconscious mental action is exemplified, as I
have said, in every act of mental association. What happens when one
idea brings up another? Some internal movement, of which we are wholly
unconscious and which we only know by its effect. What is this action,
which in Dame Quickly agglutinates contiguous circumstances by their
surfaces; in men of wit and fancy, connects remote ideas by partial
resemblances; in men of imagination, by the vital identity which
underlies phenomenal diversity; in the man of science, groups the
objects of thought in sequences of maximum resemblance? Not one of them
can answer. There is a Delphi and a Pythoness in every human breast. [At
Delphi in ancient Greece was the oracle of Apollo: the Pythoness was his
priestess.]
The poet sits down to his desk with an odd conceit in his brain; and
presently his eyes fill with tears, his thought slides into the minor
key, and his heart is full of sad and plaintive melodies. Or he goes to
his work saying "To-night I would have tears," and before he rises from
his table he has written a burlesque, such as he might think fit to send
to one of the comic papers, if these were not so commonly cemeteries of
hilarity interspersed with cenotaphs of wit and humour. These strange
hysterics of the intelligence, which make us pass from weeping to
laughter, and from laughter back again to weeping, must be familiar to
every impressible nature; and all is as automatic, involuntary, as
entirely self-evolved by a hidden organic process, as are the changing
moods of the laughing and crying woman. The poet always recognizes a
dictation from without, and we hardly think it a figure of speech when
we talk of his inspiration.
The mental attitude of the poet while writing, if I may venture to
define it, is that of the "nun, breathless with adoration." Mental
stillness is the first condition of the listening state; and I think my
friends the poets will recognize that the sense of effort, which is
often felt, accompanies the mental spasm by which the mind is maintained
in a state at once passive to the influx from without, and active in
seizing only that which will serve its purpose.[3] It is not strange
that remembered ideas should often take advantage of the crowd of
thoughts and smuggle themselves in as original. Honest thinkers are
always stealing unconsciously from each other. Our minds are full of
waifs and estrays which we think our own. Innocent plagiarism turns up
everywhere. Our best musical critic tells me that a few notes of the air
of "Shoo Fly" are borrowed from a movement in one of the magnificent
harmonies of Beethoven.
And so the orator--I do not mean the poor slave of a manuscript, who
takes his thought chilled and stiffened from its mould, but the
impassioned speaker who pours it forth as it flows coruscating from the
furnace--the orator only becomes our master at the moment when he
himself is surprised, captured, taken possession of, by a sudden rush of
fresh inspiration. How well we know the flash of the eye, the thrill of
the voice, which are the signature and symbol of nascent
thought--thought just emerging into consciousness, in which condition,
as is the case with the chemist's elements, it has a combining force at
other times wholly unknown!
But we are all more or less improvisators. We all have a double, who is
wiser and better than we are, and who puts thoughts into our heads and
words into our mouths. Do we not all commune with our own hearts upon
our beds? Do we not all divide ourselves and go to buffets on questions
of right or wrong, of wisdom or folly? Who or what is it that resolves
the stately parliament of the day, with all its forms and
conventionalities and pretences, and the great Me presiding, into the
committee of the whole, with Conscience in the chair, that holds its
solemn session through the watches of the night?
Persons who talk most do not always think most. I question whether
persons who think most--that is, have most conscious thought pass
through their minds--necessarily do most mental work. The tree that you
are sticking in "will be growing when you are sleeping." So with every
new idea that is planted in a real thinker's mind: it will be growing
when he is least conscious of it. An idea in the brain is not a legend
carved on a marble slab: it is an impression made on a living tissue,
which is the seat of active nutritive processes. Shall the initials I
carved in bark increase from year to year with the tree? and shall not
my recorded thought develop into new forms and relations with my growing
brain? Mr. Webster told one of our greatest scholars that he had to
change the size of his hat every few years. His head grew larger as his
intellect expanded. Illustrations of this same fact were shown me many
years ago by Mr. Deville, the famous phrenologist, in London. But
organic mental changes may take place in shorter spaces of time. A
single night of sleep has often brought a sober second-thought, which
was a surprise to the hasty conclusion of the day before. Lord
Polkommet's description of the way he prepared himself for a judicial
decision is in point, except for the alcoholic fertilizer he employed in
planting his ideas: "Ye see, I first read a' the pleadings; and then,
after letting them wamble in my wame wi' the toddy two or three days, I
gie my ain interlocutor."
The problem of memory is closely connected with the question of the
mechanical relation between thought and structure. How intimate is the
alliance of memory with the material condition of the brain, is shown by
the effect of age, of disease, of a blow, of intoxication. I have known
an aged person repeat the same question five, six, or seven times during
the same brief visit. Everybody knows the archbishop's flavour of
apoplexy in the memory as in the other mental powers. I was once asked
to see a woman who had just been injured in the street. On coming to
herself, "Where am I? What has happened?" she asked. "Knocked down by a
horse ma'am; stunned a little: that is all." A pause, "while one with
moderate haste might count a hundred," and then again, "Where am I? What
has happened?"--"Knocked down by a horse, ma'am; stunned a little: that
is all." Another pause, and the same question again; and so on during
the whole time I was by her. The same tendency to repeat a question
indefinitely has been observed in returning members of those
worshipping assemblies whose favourite hymn is "We Won't Go Home Till
Morning."
Is memory, then, a material record? Is the brain, like the rocks of the
Sinaitic Valley, written all over with inscriptions left by the long
caravans of thought, as they have passed year after year through its
mysterious recesses?
When we see a distant railway-train sliding by us in the same line, day
after day, we infer the existence of a track which guides it. So, when
some dear old friend begins that story we remember so well; switching
off at the accustomed point of digression; coming to a dead stop at the
puzzling question of chronology; off the track on the matter of its
being first or second cousin of somebody's aunt; set on it again by the
patient, listening wife, who knows it all as she knows her well-worn
wedding-ring--how can we doubt that there is a track laid down for the
story in some permanent disposition of the thinking-marrow?
I need not say that no microscope can find the tablet inscribed with the
names of early loves, the stains left by tears of sorrow or contrition,
the rent where the thunderbolt of passion has fallen, or any legible
token that such experiences have formed a part of the life of the
mortal, the vacant temple of whose thought it is exploring. It is only
as an inference, aided by illustration which I will presently offer,
that I suggest the possible existence, in the very substance of the
brain-tissue, of those inscriptions which Shakespeare must have thought
of when he wrote--
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow;
Raze out the written troubles of the brain.
The objection to the existence of such a material record--that we renew
our bodies many scores of times and yet retain our earliest
recollections--is entirely met by the fact, that a scar of any kind
holds it own nearly through life in spite of all these same changes, as
we have not far to look to find instances.
It must be remembered that a billion of the starry brain-cells could be
packed in a cubic inch, and that the convolutions contain one hundred
and thirty-four cubic inches, according to the estimate already given.
My illustration is derived from microscopic photography. I have a glass
slide on which there is a minute photographic picture, which is exactly
covered when the head of a small pin is laid upon it. In that little
speck are clearly to be seen, by a proper magnifying power, the
following objects: the Declaration of Independence, with easily
recognized facsimile autographs of all the signers; the arms of all the
original thirteen States; the Capitol at Washington; and very good
portraits of all the Presidents of the United States, from Washington to
Mr. James K. Polk. These objects are all distinguishable as a group with
a power of fifty diameters: with a power of three hundred any one of
them becomes a sizable picture. You may see, if you will, the majesty of
Washington on his noble features, or the will of Jackson in those hard
lines of the long face crowned with that bristling head of hair in a
perpetual state of electrical divergence and centrifugal self-assertion.
Remember that each of these faces is the record of a life.
Now recollect that there was an interval between the exposure of the
negative in the camera and its development by pouring a wash over it,
when all these pictured objects existed potentially, but absolutely
invisible and incapable of recognition, in a speck of collodion-film,
which a pin's head would cover; and then think what Alexandrian
libraries, what Congressional document loads of positively intelligible
characters--such as one look of the recording angel would bring out;
many of which we can ourselves develop at will, or which come before our
eyes unbidden, like "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin"--might be held in
those convolutions of the brain which wrap the talent entrusted to us,
too often as the folded napkin of the slothful servant hid the treasure
his master had lent him.
Three facts, so familiar that I need only allude to them, show how much
more is recorded in the memory than we may ever take cognizance of. The
first is the conviction of having been in the same precise circumstances
once or many times before. Dr. Wigan says, never but once; but such is
not my experience. The second is the panorama of their past lives, said,
by people rescued from drowning, to have flashed before them. I had it
once myself, accompanied by an ignoble ducking and scrambling
self-rescue. The third is the revival of apparently obsolete
impressions, of which many strange cases are related in nervous young
women and in dying persons, and which the story of the dog Argus in the
"Odyssey," and of the parrot so charmingly told by Campbell, would lead
us to suppose not of rare occurrence in animals. It is possible,
therefore, and I have tried to show that it is not improbable, that
memory is a material record; that the brain is scarred and seamed with
infinitesimal hieroglyphics, as the features are engraved with the
traces of thought and passion. And, if this is so, must not the record,
we ask, perish with the organ? Alas! how often do we see it perish
_before_ the organ!--the mighty satirist tamed into oblivious
imbecility; the great scholar wandering without sense of time or place
among his alcoves, taking his books one by one from the shelves and
fondly patting them; a child once more among his toys, but a child whose
to-morrows come hungry, and not full-handed--come as birds of prey in
the place of the sweet singers of morning. We must all become as little
children if we live long enough; but how blank an existence the wrinkled
infant must carry into the kingdom of heaven, if the Power that gave him
memory does not repeat the miracle by restoring it!
FOOTNOTES:
[3] Burns tell us how he composed verses for a given tune: "My way is, I
consider the poetic sentiment correspondent to my idea of the musical
expression; then choose my theme; begin one stanza. When that is
composed, which is generally the most difficult part of the business, I
walk out, sit down now and then, look out for objects in Nature that are
in unison or harmony with the cogitations of my fancy, and workings of
my bosom; humming every now and then the air with the verses I have
framed. When I feel my Muse beginning to jade I retire to the solitary
fireside of my study, and there commit my effusions to paper; swinging
at intervals on the hind-legs of my elbow-chair, by way of calling forth
my own critical strictures, as my pen goes on."--"Letters to G.
Thomson," No. XXXVII.
MEMORY
HENRY MAUDSLEY, M.D.
[Dr. Maudsley, of London, is an eminent physician and
psychologist. His works include "Body and Mind," "Body and
Will," "Responsibility in Mental Disease," "Pathology of the
Mind," all published by D. Appleton & Co., New York. From the
work last mentioned the following is part of the chapter on
Memory and Imagination.]