possessed it not he would be obliged to begin his conscious life afresh
with each impression made upon him, and would be incapable of any
education. We cannot perhaps better define memory than, following Locke,
as the power which the mind has "to revive perceptions which it once had
with this additional perception annexed to them, that it has had them
before;" in other words, as the power or process by which that which has
been once known is, when _re_presented to the mind, known as a previous
mental experience, that is, is _re_cognized. When people speak of ideas
being laid up in the memory, they of course speak metaphorically; there
is no such repository in which ideas are stored up, ready to be brought
out when required for use; when an idea which we have once had is
excited again, there is simply a reproduction of the same nervous
current, with the conscious addition that it is a reproduction--it is
the same idea _plus_ the consciousness that it is the same. The question
then suggests itself, What is the physical condition of this
consciousness? What is the modification of the anatomical substrata of
fibres and cells, or of their physiological activity, which is the
occasion of this _plus_ element in the reproduced idea? It may be
supposed that the first activity did leave behind it, when it subsided,
some after-effect, some modification of the nerve element, whereby the
nerve circuit was disposed to fall again readily into the same action;
such disposition appearing in consciousness as _re_cognition or memory.
Memory is, in fact, the conscious phase of this physiological
disposition when it becomes active or discharges its functions on the
recurrence of the particular mental experience. To assist our conception
of what may happen, let us suppose the individual nerve-elements to be
endowed with their own consciousness, and let us assume them to be, as I
have supposed, modified in a certain way by the first experience; it is
hard to conceive that when they fall into the same action on another
occasion they should not recognize or remember it; for the second action
is a reproduction of the first, with the addition of what it contains
from the after-effects of the first. As we have assumed the process to
be conscious, this reproduction with its addition would be a memory or
remembrance.
Psychology affords us not the least help in this matter, for in
describing memory as a faculty of the mind or the conservative faculty
it does no more than present us with a name in place of our explanation.
But we do get nearer realities when we go down to the organic aptitude
which, in consequence of an action, there is to the recurrence of a
similar action on another occasion. And physiology presents us with many
illustrations of such organized aptitudes. Take, for example, the
education of our movements: a designed movement is performed at first
slowly and clumsily, and it is only by giving great pains to it and
frequently repeating it that we acquire the skill to perform it easily
and quickly; the aptitude thereto being at last so completely organized
in the proper nervous centres that it may be performed without
consciousness on our part, quite automatically. Thus it appears that
memory in this case becomes less conscious as it becomes more complete,
until, when it has reached its greatest perfection and is performed with
the most facility, it is entirely unconscious. After which, if we are
psychologists who are content to rest in words and forbear to pursue the
facts which they denote, we must cease to speak of it as memory: it has
become custom, or habit, or automatism. But if we go beneath words to
the property of the motor nerve-centres whereby they react in a definite
way to impressions made upon them, organically register their
experience, and so acquire by education their special faculties, we
perceive that we have not to do in the higher nerve-centres with
fundamentally different properties of nerve element, but with different
functions which depend upon the same fundamental property. Substitute
the highest nerve-centres for the motor nerve-centres, and the complex
idea for the complex movement, and what has been said of the latter is
strictly true of the former; the idea, like the movement, is accompanied
with less consciousness the more completely it is organized, and when it
has been completely organized it takes its part automatically in our
mental operations, being performed, as a habitual movement is performed,
automatically. The physiological condition of memory is, then, the
organic process by which nerve-experiences in the different centres are
registered; and to recollect is to revive these experiences in the
highest centres, the functions of which are attended with
consciousness--to stimulate, by external or internal causes, their
residua, aptitudes, dispositions, or whatever else we may choose to call
them, into functional activity. Stimulated from without, they constitute
recognition, that is, cognition with memory of former cognition;
stimulated from within, they constitute recollection.
It must be borne in mind, as Dr. Darwin remarked many years ago, that in
dealing with memory we have to do not with laws of light, but with laws
of life, and that the misleading notion of images or ideas of objects
being stored up in the mind has been derived from our experience of the
action of light upon the retina. If we would understand the laws of
organization in the highest nerve-centres, we shall certainly do well to
study organic processes generally; it would be not less absurd to
attempt to understand the higher processes without giving attention to
the lower, than it would be to attempt to build a house without taking
pains to lay its foundations securely. It is a plain matter of
observation that other organic elements besides nervous elements
perpetuate impressions made upon them, which they may accordingly in a
certain sense be said to remember; the virus of smallpox, for example,
makes an impression upon all the elements of the body, which they never
lose, although it becomes fainter with the lapse of time; in some
unknown way it modifies their constitution so that ever afterwards their
susceptibilities are changed. The scar which is left after the healing
of a wound in a child's finger keeps the same relative proportion to the
finger through life, growing as it grows; for the elements of the new
tissue not only renew themselves particle by particle, and thus
perpetuate it, but they extend it in relation with the growth of the
surrounding parts. We need not brave the fire of psychological scorn by
calling this retention of impressions _memory_, or care greatly what it
is called, so long as due heed is given to the fact; but we may be
permitted to perceive in it the same physiological process which, in the
cortical [outer] layers of the cerebral [brain's] hemispheres, is the
condition of memory, and of habit in thought. Moreover, it may be fairly
demanded of the psychologists that they be consistent, and that they no
longer use the word memory to denote those mental processes which have
been so completely organized that they take place without consciousness;
if it be wrong, as they profess, to assume or imply an unconscious
memory, it must be still more wrong to assume or imply an unconscious
consciousness, as they sometimes do.
In any case, the foregoing considerations cannot fail to show how
misleading it is to look upon perceptions as mere pictures of nature,
and upon the mind as a vast canvas on which they are cunningly painted;
the real process is one of organization, and it is rightly conceivable
only by the aid of ideas derived from the observation of organic
development--namely, the fundamental ideas of Assimilation of the like
and Differentiation of the unlike. Nowhere is it more necessary than in
the study of memory to apprehend clearly that what we call mind is the
function of a mental organization; for thereby we get rid at once of
many empty discussions which have been carried on without definite
result; as, for example, whether memory is a knowledge of the past, or a
knowledge of the present with a belief of the past, and the like.
Moreover, this conception of a mental organization is indispensable to
the explanation of the manifold varieties of partial or general loss of
memory which are produced by injury, disease and decay of brain; for
memory is good or bad according to bodily states, is impaired in various
ways by disease, decays with the decay of structure in old age, and is
extinguished with the extinction of life in the brain.
From of old two kinds of memory have been distinguished, according as
the object remembered occurs to the mind spontaneously, or is
voluntarily sought for; the former being known as _memory_ proper, the
latter as _recollection_. It is certain that we do recognize this
difference, which common language attests, between that which is revived
without any effort, and that which we endeavour to recover by an effort;
and that men differ much, by virtue of natural capacities, both in
memory and in power of recollection. No doubt much of the difference in
both cases is due to the degree of attention which is given to the
subject when it is first presented to the mind, but this will not
account satisfactorily for all the difference which is observed; some
persons being able to repeat with great ease a row of figures, a number
of dates, or several lines of poetry, after reading them over once,
while others fail to do so with equal success after reading them over
many times. Extraordinary instances have been recorded of this exactness
of memory for details reaching back to the earliest periods of life. I
have seen an imbecile in the Earlswood Asylum for idiots who can repeat
accurately a page or more of any book which he has read years before,
even though it was a book which he did not understand in the least; and
I once saw an epileptic youth, morally imbecile, who would, shutting his
eyes, repeat a leading article in a newspaper word for word, after
reading it once. This kind of memory, in which the person seems to read
a photographic copy of former impressions with his mind's eye, is not
indeed commonly associated with great intellectual power; for what
reason I know not, unless it be that the mind to which it belongs is
prevented by the very excellence of its power of apprehending and
recalling separate facts from rising to that discernment of their higher
relations which is involved in reasoning and judgment, and so stays in a
function which should be the foundation of its further development; or
that, being by some natural defect prevented from rising to the higher
sphere of comprehension of relations, it applies all its energies to the
apprehension of details. Certainly one runs some risk, by overloading
the memory of a child with details, of arresting the development of the
mental powers: stereotyping details on the brain, we prevent that
further development of it which consists in rising from concrete
perception to conception of relations. However, it must be allowed that
there have been a few remarkable instances of extraordinary men who have
combined a wonderful memory for details with the possession of the
highest intellectual powers.
If we now proceed to examine closely the nature of recollection, it will
be found that the difference between it and simple memory is not
fundamentally so great as appears on the surface. When we voluntarily
try hard to remember something which has been forgotten, and succeed in
the end, the actual revival is done unconsciously and, as it were,
spontaneously; for it is plain that if we were conscious of what we want
we should not need to recollect it, inasmuch as it would already be in
possession; and it is furthermore plain that a definite act of volition
recalling it must imply a consciousness of it, inasmuch as it is
impossible to will what we are not conscious of. Arbitrary recollection
by an act of will is therefore nonsense. What we really do when we try
to recollect is to apply attention to words or ideas which have, in our
past experience, accidental or essential relations to, or associations
with, the forgotten word or idea, voluntarily to keep these ideas active
by making them consciousness and to trust to their power of awakening
into activity that which it is desired to recall; indeed, it is
notorious that the best way of succeeding is, having held the related
ideas energetically in attention for a time, to allow the thoughts to
pass to other things, when the lost idea will, after a longer or shorter
time--sometimes indeed after days--recur to the mind. The actual process
of reproduction is therefore one of simple or spontaneous memory; we
prepare the way for it by stimulating into action the related ideas,
but we positively interfere with its success if, by continuing to keep
them in attention, we do not permit them to do their work spontaneously;
the reason of this being that we thereby hinder the propagation of their
activity to other nerve-circuits. We shall understand this the better if
we realize that consciousness is the _result_ of a certain activity of
idea, not driven to it, but drawn by it, and get rid of the metaphysical
notion that it is some mysterious power which we direct voluntarily to
the idea in order to make it active.
It will not be amiss, before passing from this subject, to take note of
and to ponder that certainty which, in trying to recollect something, we
have of our possession of what we are thus striving to gain consciously,
though we are not conscious what it is. We have the clearest conviction
that, although we have forgotten it, we still have it and may recover
it. How comes it to pass that we are so sure of the existence of that of
which we are not conscious? In the first place, it would appear to
supply an argument in support of the theory that something has been left
behind in the nerve-circuit ministering to the forgotten idea, in other
words, retained by it, which differentiates it from other
nerve-circuits, disposes it to a repetition of its former activity, and
produces the conviction of a latent possession, even when it is not
active, or at any rate not active enough to awaken consciousness. In
the second place, it must be remembered that the forgotten idea had
associations with other ideas, which are really part of its meaning; it
may well be, therefore, that when these are active and occupy the
attention, while it remains inactive and below the horizon of
consciousness, there is a tendency or sort of effort to reopen the
former paths of association, in order to their completeness--to make the
circuit, so to speak; and that it is the consciousness of this tendency
or effort which gives rise to the certainty which we have of something
forgotten. Certain it is, that when a stimulus excites one of two
movements which have taken place together or in succession on former
occasions, there is a tendency, when the stimulus is powerful or
continued, to the reproduction of the associated movement; there is a
diffusion of the stimulus along the accustomed path to the associated
motor centres, and a union of movements is the result. A piece of poetry
which has been thoroughly learnt may be repeated mechanically, as a tune
may be whistled, when the proper verbal movements have been once
started; indeed, the repetition in such case is most successful when
consciousness is not too much occupied with it; for it frequently
happens, if we think about the words which we are repeating, we become
uncertain and forget, and are obliged, in order to succeed, to begin
again and allow the succession of movements to go on automatically. We
impede the operation of the spontaneous memory, upon which we really
depend, when, by maintaining the activity of a word in consciousness as
attention, we hinder the propagation thereof to the associated
nerve-circuits.
When a person who is conscious of an idea is striving to revive a
related idea which he has forgotten, he presents an example of memory in
the making; for he is striving to revive the yet incomplete organic
union between them, which was the result of the original apprehension of
their relations, and which, when complete, will cause the one idea to
recall the other instantly and without the least effort, just as a
single sensation of an object at once revives the cluster of sensations
which are combined in the perception of it. The process of intellectual
development consists in the mental organization of related ideas, as
internal representatives of external relations in nature, and in making
this organization so complete that a number of associated ideas shall
act like a single idea, being combined into a complex product and
recalled instantly and without conscious effort, just as a complex
movement is. Then the memory is so complete that we must cease to call
it memory, because it is unconscious. In fact, spontaneous recollection
is at an end when involuntary memory begins, and involuntary memory
merges gradually into a reproduction of former mental experiences which
is as completely automatic as the habitual movements of our daily life.
And well it may be; for the same organic property of nerve
element--indeed, I might say, the same fundamental property of
organization--is at the bottom of both.
Thus much concerning the nature and function of memory. Upon its basis
rests the possibility of mental development, in which there are, as we
have already seen, the organic registration of the _simple_ ideas of the
senses; the assimilation of the like in ideas which takes place in the
production or evolution of _general_ ideas; the assimilation, of the
properties common to two or more general ideas into an _abstract_ idea;
the special organization or differentiation, or discrimination, of
unlike ideas; the organic combination of the ideas derived from the
different senses into one _complex_ idea, with the further manifold
combinations of complex ideas into what Hartley called _duplex_ ideas.
In fact, no limit is assignable to the complexity of combinations which
may go to the formation of a compound idea. Take, for example, the idea
of the universe. But how comes it to pass that a new imaginative
creation of the mind, to which nothing in nature answers, is effected?
By the same process fundamentally as that by which our general and
abstract ideas are formed. For when we consider the matter, it appears
that there are no actual outside existences answering to our most
abstract ideas, which are, therefore, so far new creations of the mind;
in their formation there is a blending or coalescence of the like
relations in two concrete ideas--the development of a _concept_, there
is, as it were, an extraction of the essential out of the particular, a
sublimation of the concrete; and, by the creation of a new world in
which these essential ideas supersede the concrete ideas, the power of
the mind is most largely extended. Now, although there are no concrete
objects in nature answering to these abstract ideas, yet these are none
the less, when rightly formed, valid and real subjective existences
expressing or signifying the essential relations of things, as the
flower which crowns development expresses the essential nature of the
plant. Thus it is that we rise from the idea of a particular man to the
general idea of man, and from that to the abstract idea of virtue as a
quality of man; so that for the future we can make use of the abstract
idea in all our reasoning, without being compelled to make continual
reference to the concrete. Herein, be it remembered again, we have a
process corresponding with that which ministers to the production of our
motor intuitions; the acquired faculty of certain co-ordinate movements
by means of which complicated acts are automatically performed, and we
are able to do, almost in the twinkling of an eye, what would cost hours
of labour were we compelled on each occasion to go deliberately through
the process of special adaptation, is the equivalent, on the motor side,
of the general idea by which so much time and labour are saved in
reasoning: in both cases there is an internal development in accordance
with fundamental laws, and the organized result is, as every new phase
of development is, a new creation. Creation is not by fits and starts,
but it is continuous in nature.
COMMON SENSE
WILLIAM BOYD CARPENTER, M.D.
[Dr. Carpenter was one of the leading men of science in the
generation which has recently passed away. He was a physician
and psychologist of mark, and withal a geographer of
erudition and extensive travel. His famous work, "Principles
of Mental Physiology," is published by D. Appleton & Co., New
York. Its eleventh chapter, minus a few paragraphs, is here
presented.]
There are two principal forms of common sense which it is desirable
clearly to distinguish. The first is what the philosopher means by
common sense, when he attributes to it the formation of those original
convictions or ultimate beliefs, which cannot be resolved into simpler
elements, and which are accepted by every normally constituted human
being as direct cognitions of his own mental states. It might, indeed,
be maintained that this necessary acceptance of propositions which only
need to be intelligibly stated to command unhesitating and universal
assent, cannot rightly be termed an act of judgment. But just as
sense-perceptions, which are intuitive in the lower animals, have been
acquired in man by a process of self-education in the earliest stages,
in which acts of judgment are continually called for, so may we regard
the autocratic deliverances of the universal common sense of mankind as
really having, in the first instance, the characters of true judgments,
each expressing the general resultant of uniform experience,--which may
be partly of the individual, and partly that of the race embodied in the
constitution of each member of it.
The second or popular acceptance of the term common sense, on the other
hand, is that of an attribute which judges of things whose self-evidence
is not equally apparent to every individual, but presents itself to
different individuals in very different degrees, according in part to
the original constitution of each, and in part to the range of his
experience and degree in which he has profited by it. This is the form
of common sense by which we are mainly guided in the ordinary affairs of
life: but inasmuch as we no longer find its deliverances in uniform
accordance, but encounter continual divergences of judgment as to what
things are self-evident,--some being so to A whilst they are not so to
B, and others being self-evident to B which are not so to A,--it cannot
be trusted as an autocratic or infallible authority. And yet, as Dr.
Reid truly says, "disputes very often terminate in an appeal to common
sense;" this being especially the case, when to doubt its judgment would
be ridiculous.
If the view here taken be correct, these two forms--which may be
designated respectively as elementary and as ordinary common sense--have
fundamentally the same basis; and we may further connect with them as
having a similar genesis, those special forms of common sense, which
are the attributes of such as have applied themselves in a scientific
spirit to any particular course of inquiry,--things coming to be
perfectly self-evident to men of such special culture, which ordinary
men, or men whose special culture has lain in a different direction, do
not apprehend as such.