MEMORY AND IMAGINATION
Inventors seem to treasure up in their minds, what they have found
out, after another manner than those do the same things, who have
not this inventive faculty. The former, when they have occasion to
produce their knowledge, are in some measure obliged immediately to
investigate part of what they want. For this they are not equally fit
at all times; so it has often happened, that such as retain things
chiefly by means of a very strong memory, have appeared off hand more
expert than the discoverers themselves.—HENRY PEMBERTON
§ 38. =Recognition.=—The working of the associative tendencies in
the brain guarantees the revival of past experiences; it does not, so
far as we have described it, guarantee that we remember. For _memory,
in the psychological sense, implies recognition_; the remembered
experience is not only revived, but is also familiar, comes to us
as a bit of our own past history. We must try to find out what this
familiarity is.
Suppose that you are entering a street-car. As you enter, you run your
eyes over the line of faces before you. The first half-dozen of your
fellow-passengers are strangers; their faces arouse no interest and do
not arrest your gaze. At the end of the car, however, you see a friend
whom you have not met, perhaps, for some time; you recognise him. Your
indifference is suddenly gone; you call him by name, take a seat at his
side, and begin to talk with him. What has happened?
Something has happened that, if you analyse it, recalls the first
of the three connective patterns discussed on p. 161. The visual
perception of your friend is supplemented by a _verbal idea_, his name.
Along with the name comes a peculiar _sense-feeling_, a feeling that
you may characterise as a glow of warmth, a feeling of intimacy, a
feeling of sociable ease, of relaxation from the formal manner that you
wear with strangers. And hardly has the feeling formed when _ideas_ of
sorts begin to crowd upon you, and the conversation starts. All this
complexity of mental connection is there, and the whole experience may
be called a recognition; but we cannot, of course, accept it at its
face-value; we must still ask how much of it is essential, and whether
one or more of the three factors—name, feeling, ideas—may be left out
while recognition remains.
Experiment shows that the _one thing necessary to recognition is the_
=feeling of familiarity=. In some cases the incoming ideas, and more
especially the direct verbal supplement of the perception, the name,
seem to be integral factors in the experience; but recognition is
possible in their absence; and, what is more, recognition may fail in
their presence; a perception may call up ideas that are objectively
correct, and yet there may be no recognition of the thing perceived.
_Recognition, then, is essentially a feeling, a sense-feeling of
the agreeable and relaxing type, diffusively organic in its sensory
character_; any perception or idea to which this feeling attaches is,
by that very fact, the perception or idea of something recognised.
That is as far as analysis can take us. If we care to go further, and
speculate, we may venture to guess that the feeling of familiarity is
a weakened survival of the =emotion of relief=, of fear unfulfilled.
There is a distinct touch of pleasurable relief, of the letting-down
of strain, in the feeling as we have it; and the derivation is
therefore psychologically reasonable. Moreover, primitive man was so
defenceless an animal that the strange must always have been cause
for anxiety; language, indeed, bears witness on the point; for ‘fear’
is, etymologically, the state of mind of the traveller, the ‘farer’
away from home; and ‘hostis,’ which we translate enemy, originally
meant simply stranger. The bodily and mental attitude which expresses
recognition thus seems to be still the attitude of going off guard, of
ease and confidence. In our everyday life, as you will readily see,
the tinge of sense-feeling may be overlaid by the heavier colours of
some positive emotion; we may recognise an acquaintance with whom we
are heartily angry, or whose conduct has brought us sorrow; primitive
man himself recognised his enemies! But in the laboratory, where
these disturbing influences are ruled out, the nature of the feeling
of familiarity comes clearly to light; intrinsically, recognition is
always an agreeable and relaxing experience.
In everyday life, again, our _recognitions may be of all degrees of
definiteness_. They are indefinite when the feeling of familiarity
comes up alone, without the name or the associated ideas; when, for
instance, we pass someone on the street, and say to our companion
“I’m sure I know that face!” and so pass on. They are somewhat more
definite when the perception is supplemented by a general name. As
we glance down the line of strangers in the street-car we may think
to ourselves “doctor,—farmer,—commercial traveller—soldier”;
the feeling of familiarity then represents our recognition of the
class. Lastly, they are definite when one or more of the contributory
factors—the name, the organic stir of the feeling, the incoming
ideas—carry an unequivocal reference to our past experience, mean
some definite incident of our past life. We chance to overhear a name
in conversation; and “Why,” we break in, “that’s the man I went up the
Gross Glockner with in ‘98!”—the recognition is definite. _There is no
real psychological difference_ between the three cases; the difference
lies only in the range of meaning which the contextual processes carry.
_There is a psychological difference_, however, between all the cases
of recognition which we have hitherto mentioned and certain other
cases: a difference _between direct and indirect recognition_. The
recognition is direct when the perception at once, of itself, calls up
the recognitive feeling. It is indirect when the feeling attaches, not
directly to the perception, but to some idea or some other perception
connected with the given perception. We pass a stranger on the street;
but we are suddenly hailed by a familiar voice; the recognition of the
voice makes us look hard at the stranger’s face, and we then recognise
him as an old college friend. We try to find our host’s face in a
group-photograph of schoolboys, and we are wholly puzzled to identify
him; the face is pointed out in the picture, and we turn from it to
the mature face with which we are familiar; the photograph grows more
and more like, the more closely we compare the two; presently we get a
sudden conviction of their identity, the recognition of the photograph
is complete, and we wonder that we could have failed to pick the right
boy at the outset. In both these instances, _recognition hinges on the
feeling of familiarity_; but something else happens, something that
reminds us of the second connective pattern of p. 161, where an idea
is read into a perception, or the perception resolved into an idea.
There are times, too, when recognition is halting and partial, when the
feeling of familiarity alternates with a feeling of strangeness; in
such experiences the play of associative tendencies may be extremely
complex.
§ 39. =Direct Apprehension.=—We saw on p. 120 that meaning, which was
at first a fringe of mental processes, a contextual setting of some bit
of bare experience, may in course of time be carried by nerve-processes
which have no mental correlates of any kind. The same thing seems to
hold of recognition. We do not, in strictness, ‘recognise’ the clothes
that we put on every morning, or the desk at which we are accustomed to
write; we =apprehend= them, directly, as our clothes and our desk; we
take them for granted. The feeling of familiarity, the feeling of being
at home with our own things, changes first to something that is still
a feeling, though weaker and more nebulous; to something that we may
describe as an ‘of-course’ feeling, which is still some distance away
from sheer indifference. As the days and weeks go on, this of-course
feeling itself dies out; the stimuli no longer have power to arouse
a feeling at all, and the organism faces the habitual situations
without any organic stir. We apprehend the clothes and desk _as_ ours,
precisely as we perceive the tree and the piano _as_ spatial (p. 115).
In experiments on the recognition of greys, the author has reported
positively that a particular grey had been seen before, without
being able to find anything whatsoever, in the way of verbal idea or
kinæsthetic quiver or organic thrill, that might carry the meaning of
familiarity; the brain-habit just touched off the report ‘Yes,’ and
that was all that could be said.
_That brain-habit, however, had a psychological history behind it;
and the history shows itself whenever our direct apprehension is in
some manner disturbed or prevented._ We reach out to our inkstand,
and find that the pen which always lies in it has disappeared; or
we glance round the breakfast-room, and notice that a picture which
always hangs upon a certain wall has gone. We have not been wont to
recognise the pen and the picture; they were just matters of course.
Now that they are absent, however, the situation jars upon us; we
have a pronounced feeling of helplessness or of displeased surprise.
That is as far, perhaps, as ordinary observation goes; but there is
really more to be observed. For at the moment of disturbance, before
the disagreeable feeling has arisen, the ‘of-course’ feeling springs
up in unusual strength; it is as if, for a brief space, we reverted
in imagination to a true recognition of the missing object. And even
after the displeasure is there, we may go back more than once to the
familiar state of affairs; we can’t believe, as we say, we can’t
trust our eyes, the thing has always been in that place; so that the
glow of recognition alternates with the dominant feeling. In a word,
_the disturbance of apprehension has brought back to life certain
stages in the past history of the brain-habit_, stages in which the
nerve-processes had as their correlates the mental processes that make
up the feeling of familiarity.
This passage of recognition, from the characteristic feeling of
familiarity through the weaker of-course feeling into a sheer
brain-habit or nervous set, illustrates the descending phase of a
progression which is typical in psychology, and which is summed up in
the =law of mental growth and decay=. We are constantly finding that
a mental formation, a particular complex of mental processes, is at
first thin and scant, then enriches itself by various supplementary
processes, and then again thins out or tails off—finally, into
mental nothingness; and recognition illustrates the downward half of
the curve. The law was strongly insisted on by the late G. H. Lewes,
an author who wrote largely on psychological topics, but who is
better known to the general reader from his association with George
Eliot. “This process,” Lewes tell us, “underlies all development.
The voluntary actions become involuntary, the involuntary become
automatic; the intelligent become habitual, and the habitual become
instinctive. It is the same in the higher regions of intellect: the
slow acquisitions of centuries of research become condensed into axioms
which are intuitions.” We have already met the law in our discussions
of attention and meaning; and we shall meet it again when we come to
discuss action.
§ 40. =The Memory-Idea.=—But where, all this while, is the
memory-image? If you had been asked, before you read the foregoing
paragraphs, what happens when you recognise somebody or something, you
would probably have replied, as the associationists reply: ‘The present
sight of the object calls up an _image_ of that object, by the law of
similarity; then the image or idea is compared with the perception,
and the two are found to agree; and this agreement is what I mean
by recognition.’ If it were then objected that observation fails to
show any such idea or image, you would perhaps have said: ‘The whole
thing takes place so quickly that the factors cannot ordinarily be
distinguished; but all the same that is what must happen.’ And so you
would have kept your faith in the image.
_Such an image may, in fact, appear._ It may appear in the cases
of halting and partial recognition that we referred to on p. 181;
but it need not necessarily appear even there; its intervention is,
indeed, as rare as the third type of mental connection, the clean-cut
succession of p. 161. You will perhaps get at the heart of the matter
most easily if we lay down, at once, the general principle that _no
imaginal process or complex of imaginal processes is in its own right a
memory-idea_. Even if the simple images which compose it are different
from sensations (p. 77), it must still be called a complex image, and
nothing more; not an idea of memory. A complex of imaginal processes
becomes, _is made into_, a memory-idea by an attendant feeling of
familiarity; just exactly as a perception, a complex of sensory
processes, is made into a recognition of something by the same feeling
of familiarity. So that _an idea, in order to be a memory-idea, must
bear the memory-label_; and the label will be either the sense-feeling
of familiarity proper, or else some weaker and more fleeting feeling of
the ‘of-course’ kind. It is true, again, that an idea which has lived
through this history may be taken _as_ a memory-idea when the label has
dropped away; but even then it is a memory-idea, not in its own right,
but in right of the brain-habit behind it. No group of images, taken
out of its mental setting or removed from the directive pressure of a
brain-habit, can be known as a memory; it might be hallucination or
dream or imagination or anything else; it is just a group of images.
Our quarrel with popular psychology goes further still. _The whole
notion that a memory-idea is a copy of past experience is wrong_; the
idea may copy the perception, but it need not; and usually it does
not. You remember that, after we had formulated our own law of mental
connection, we introduced the catch-phrase ‘marriage by proxy’; and you
remember why. What, now, is the essential thing about a memory-idea?
Not, surely, that it should copy past experience, but that it should
_mean_ past experience. Our individual equipment of images is so
variable (p. 139) that we should be very badly off if we were limited,
in what we remember, to copies of our perceptions; _A_, who has no
visual images, could then remember nothing that he had seen, and _B_,
who has no auditory images, could remember nothing that he had heard!
Such are the straits to which popular psychology must logically reduce
us. In point of fact, _A_ remembers well enough what he has seen;
only, the visual parts of his experience are translated into other
modes, perhaps verbal-motor. In that event a verbal-motor image, set
in the right context and accompanied by a feeling of familiarity, may
mean for _A_ some visual object that he perceived so many years since.
It goes flat against common sense to assert that a verbal-motor image
is the ‘memory’ of the visual perception; and yet that is just what the
verbal-motor image, in its present setting, actually is.
_This translation of perception into imagery of another mode has
curious consequences._ I may declare positively that I remember having
heard Patti sing forty years ago, when all that I really remember is
the statement itself, the form of words which carries my meaning. Nay
more, if my mind is of the imaginal type, I may have taken my cue
from the verbal statement, and have conjured up a mental picture of
the performance, a picture now so familiar that I could swear to the
pink dress,—were it not that a contemporary notice writes it down as
cream! _Words often repeated are in this way highly deceptive_; and
there is good psychology in the story of the traveller who told his
romantic tales so often that he finally believed them himself. Many of
us, if we would but confess it, remember things that happened before
we were born; the account of them was impressed on us in childhood,
and was later bodied forth in images; and now their ideas bear the
memory-label. Here, then, is one source of the ‘untrustworthiness’ of
memory, which is at the same time a possible source of the Platonic
doctrine of reminiscence.
§41. =Illusions of Recognition and Memory.=—Psychologically, an
illusory memory is a memory, just as an illusory perception is a
perception. We speak of _illusion_ when our experience fails to square
with what, from our knowledge of external circumstances and of other
like experiences, we might have expected; the distinction is therefore
practical, not scientific. We shall avail ourselves of it, partly for
convenience’ sake, and partly because certain cases of illusion offer
special problems to the psychologist.
Most of us, probably, have an occasional acquaintance with what is
called =paramnesia= or wrong recognition: a definite ‘feeling that all
this has happened before,’ sometimes connected with a ‘feeling that
we know exactly what is coming,’—a ‘feeling’ which persists for a
few seconds and carries positive conviction, in spite of the fact and
the knowledge that the experience is novel; Dickens gives an instance
in _David Copperfield_. Various explanations have been offered of
the phenomenon. It occurs most frequently after periods of emotional
stress, or in the state of extreme mental fatigue; that is, at a time
when the associative tendencies in the brain are abnormally weak; and
it seems to depend, essentially, upon a disjunction of mental processes
that are normally held together in a single state of attention. Suppose
the following case: you are about to cross a crowded street, and you
take a hasty glance in both directions to make sure of a safe passage.
Now your eye is caught, for a moment, by the contents of a shop window;
and you pause, though only for a moment, to survey the window before
you actually cross the street. Paramnesia would then appear as the
feeling that you had already crossed; the preliminary glance up and
down, which ordinarily connects with the crossing in a single attentive
experience, is disjoined from the crossing; the look at the window,
casual as it was, has been able to disrupt the associative tendencies.
As you cross, then, you think ‘Why, I crossed this street just now’;
your nervous system has severed two phases of a single experience, both
of which are familiar, and the latter of which appears accordingly as a
repetition of the earlier. The illusion will evidently be strengthened
if, as is only natural, the casual look at the window does not recur to
you. This is an imaginary case, simplified for clearness of exposition;
and we cannot be at all sure that the explanation which it suggests is
correct; for cases of paramnesia cannot be realised at will, and the
nervous condition that leads to them is not favourable to scientific
observation; but something of the sort must take place.
Illusions of memory have been touched upon on p. 186. We may remember
something that never happened; we may remember something that happened,
but could not have happened to us; we make all kinds of mistakes in
memory; we fail to remember a great deal that has happened. These
chances of error are inherent in the laws of associative tendency, and
in the character of the memory-image. There is one illusion, however,
that requires a word of comment: the illusion of the ‘=good old days=,’
the tendency of every man past middle age to be _laudator temporis
acti se puero_. This has often been referred to the principle that we
remember pleasurable experiences better than unpleasurable; we are so
constituted, it is said, that the disagreeable events of our past life
are forgotten and the agreeable are conserved in memory. The principle,
however, has never been established, and there is some experimental
evidence against it. In all probability, _the illusion is due to many
contributing factors_. First of all, our nervous system takes its
general set in childhood; it is then that we acquire standards of right
and wrong, of social position, of daily intercourse and occupation.
In so far as later experiences interfere with this set, the old order
will be preferred. Secondly, our self-centredness (p. 2) leads us
to idealise our past self; we think of ourselves as more important,
more heroic, more dominating, more regarded, not only than we were,
but also than any youngster of our sort could possibly have been;
autobiographies, however truthful in intention, bring out the point
with sufficient clearness. So we contrast our present struggles with
the triumphs of an unreal past. Thirdly, the old days were, in one
sense, really happier for us than the new; happier because we had no
responsibilities, because there was a generation of adults to whom we
could appeal; and we are very prone to confuse our own greater comfort
with a better status of society. These are obvious considerations, but
they and things like them are enough to account for the illusion.
§ 42. =The Pattern of Memory.=—Psychology cannot yet offer any
adequate description of the pattern that mental processes display, the
arrangement that they fall into, when we are remembering. Memory, as
we are all aware, may occur in the state of primary attention, when we
call it remembrance, or in the state of secondary attention, when we
call it recollection. Something may be said under both heads; but our
account must be largely figurative and conventional.
Let us take =remembrance= first. There seems to be, as it were in
the background, something that holds us down to a particular circle
of ideas, or, in other words, that limits the play of ideas to some
particular situation. This something may be a group of contextual
mental processes, or may be merely a nervous disposition; we shall
have more to say of it later (§ 48). Upon the background move mental
processes of extraordinary instability, all of them tinged more or less
strongly by the feeling of familiarity. Attention is labile and fluid;
the focus is occupied now by visual or other imagery, now by scraps
of kinæsthesis, and now by organic or verbal processes that carry a
personal meaning and reference; and the whole mental stream contracts
and expands, pauses and hurries, and shows the most abrupt changes
of direction. All of which is sadly vague! but let the reader catch
himself ‘reminiscing,’ and he will realise the general truth of the
description, and also the extreme difficulty of making it more concrete.
In =recollection=, the background is filled by the intent to recall;
and this intent may, again, be constituted by contextual mental
processes or carried by a nervous set. The course of recollection may
then be characterised as _a reconstruction along the lines of least
resistance_. Some bit of imagery, some form of words comes up, and
is at once met, so to say, by the feeling of familiarity. Further
ideas present themselves, in more or less disorderly fashion, and the
feeling plays upon them, accepting here and rejecting there, serving
throughout the experience as a court of final appeal. Some of the
ideas are directly recognised; some seem to force our acceptance by
their vividness; some pass muster because familiar verbal ideas, names
or phrases, are connected with them. Some, that leave us in doubt as
they arise, are shelved for the time, to be judged later on, when the
positive acceptances are done with; and they are likely to be judged
in the light of these acceptances, and of our general knowledge of
the situation which we are trying to recall; even a weak recognitive
feeling is enough to give them status. In and out among these ideas
run threads of kinæsthesis, which imitate or repeat fragments of the
original experience. There is thus a veritable tangle of processes; the
situation is not reproduced in image, and its items read off in logical
order; it is rather reconstructed; and the reconstruction follows, as
has been said, the lines of least resistance at the moment. Yet we
are so accustomed to the logical order of speech that our narrative,
as recollection proceeds, may give but little hint of the tangled
interplay of ideas; at most we may correct ourselves at points, or
remark that just now we left something out. Observe the flow of mind
itself, and the disorder is apparent.
We may say, then, that _the pattern of memory is a discursive movement
within fixed boundaries_; the boundaries are given by the set or
background, as we have named it, by the fact (in other words) that we
are recalling a particular situation or event; and the discursiveness
reveals itself in roaming of attention and shift of ideas, which imply
a variable activity of the associative tendencies. The characteristic
processes are the _feeling of familiarity_ and the _imitative
kinæsthesis_.
§ 43. =Mnemonics.=—Rules for remembering, tricks of memorising, were
considered of great importance in the ancient world; oratory was
highly esteemed; and no orator before the time of Augustus would have
ventured to use notes. As the art declined, these rules were less and
less regarded; we hear practically nothing of them between the first
and the thirteenth centuries of the present era. From that date,
however, interest in _artificial memory-systems_ has never died out;
they have been recommended for sermons, for lectures, for disputations,
for public speeches, for the learning of foreign languages, for
examinations, for practically every occasion in which memory is
employed, as well as for the improvement of memory itself.
_The great principle of mnemonics is that you remember the novel
and the disconnected by bringing it into arbitrary relation to the
familiar and the connected._ Everybody, for instance, is thoroughly
at home in his own house; the positions of the rooms are known, and
their employment for the necessary purposes of the family holds them
together. Suppose, then, that you are to deliver a speech, and that the
speech has eight principal points. You think of yourself as entering
the house: the first point you deposit in the hall, the second in the
drawing-room, the third in the library, the fourth in the back hall,
the fifth in the kitchen, the sixth in the pantry, the seventh in the
dining-room, the eighth on the upstairs landing. You think of yourself
as making the separate points in these different places; if possible,
you invent some fanciful connection between the point and the place
where you deposit it; if, for example, your second or drawing-room
point is an historical reference, you might think of ‘drawing a hiss’
from your audience; anything will do, provided it is the sort of thing
to stick! This local or _topographical way of memorising_ has always
been popular; it is said that our ordinary phrases ‘in the first
place,’ ‘in the second place,’ derive from it. _Number-alphabets_,
in which certain letters stand for certain figures, are also much
employed; dates, physical constants, statistical numbers, may thus be
memorised. The _rhythm of verse_ has been appealed to; if you want to
remember the seven cities that laid claim to the birth of Homer, you
learn the hexameter-line ‘Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Salamis, Rhodos,
Argos, Athenæ’; and you are helped—if further help is wanted—by the
pattern of the initial letters SCCS-RAA.
_Such devices have a special and temporary utility_; we have all taken
examinations, and probably we have all had recourse to them on a larger
or smaller scale. Many of us have paid the not infrequent penalty; we
have remembered our mnemonic doggerel, but have forgotten the key to
it, and so have forgotten the events or numbers that it was meant to
recall; there is always that danger. _No scheme of memory-aids that
is universally applicable and universally reliable has been or can
be discovered_; there is no royal road to learning. In so far as a
mnemonic rule follows the laws of associative tendency, as for many
minds the local or topographical rule seems to do; or in so far as it
chimes with some peculiarity of individual thinking; in so far, it will
be of practical service in daily life; that is the most that can be
said.
§ 44. =The Idea of Imagination.=—We think of memory as reproducing
the old, and of imagination, no less positively, as producing the new;
the very word _poet_ means the maker, and the word _artist_ means
the fitter or joiner. Imagination cannot, of course, give us new
qualities of experience; we cannot imagine a new colour, different from
all known colours, or a new sensation—say, a specific sensation of
electricity—different from the known sensations of skin and underlying
tissues. _Imagination does, however, give us novel connections_; and
experiment shows that an idea comes to us as imagined only if it comes
as unfamiliar, with the feeling of novelty or strangeness upon it.
In real life, the =feeling of strangeness= is soon swamped by alien
feelings, by the artist’s joy or pride, dissatisfaction or despair;
in the laboratory, it appears strongly by itself. The observers speak
of a feeling of novelty, of personal detachment, of creepiness, of
weirdness, of something out of the ordinary, of peculiar discomfort.
Compare this list of terms with a sentence from Lafcadio Hearn’s last
book: “The outward strangeness of things in Japan produces a queer
thrill impossible to describe,—a feeling of weirdness which comes to
us only with the perception of the totally unfamiliar”; there is no
doubt that the same experience is intended. It is, at first thought, a
little surprising that an idea of imagination, which after all derives
from the observers’ own experience, and which is obtained under the
rather tame and colourless conditions of a psychological experiment,
should have so strong a tinge of feeling. Yet we need not be surprised;
for we have already learned that the novel stimulus has power to compel
the attention; it stands alone and unrelated; and for that reason it
startles and arrests us (p. 94). If the ideas aroused in the laboratory
mattered, if they were practically important for their owners’ careers,
then the feeling of strangeness would, as we have said, be overborne
by other feelings; but they do not matter, and so can be developed and
observed for what they are.
An idea, then, becomes or _is made into_ an idea of imagination by its
mental setting, which is this feeling of strangeness, the opposite of
the feeling of familiarity. As regards the nature of the feeling, we
may guess that it is _the modern representative of primitive man’s
anxiety and uneasiness in face of the unknown_, an echo from the time
when the new was the dangerous (p. 179). If the idea is often repeated,
the feeling wears off, and is replaced by a directive brain-habit; we
still take it _as_ an idea of imagination, but we do not re-imagine
it. If it is still further repeated, it ceases even to be taken as
imaginative, and becomes one of the habitual images that we spoke of on
p. 77.
There is a second difference between _the idea of imagination_ and the
idea of memory: the difference, namely, that the former _cannot be
replaced by another mode of imagery_. An idea of imagination must not
simply mean something new; it must _be_ something new. We know that
images of imagination are not indispensable to artistic work; painters
do not necessarily possess visual imagery (p. 141). Where the idea
of imagination does exist, however, it keeps its original form. The
French mural painter Puvis de Chavannes used to contemplate, for days
together, the bare spaces that he was to fill; ‘wasting time,’ a friend
told him, and received the reply “I have to see my picture before I
can paint it.” In a case like this, the mental picture—though it may
be modified as the actual colours are laid on, or as new outlines
suggest themselves to the painter—must, so far as it furnishes a
guide and model, hold its form and colour-scheme almost as fixedly as
a perception; otherwise it would be useless. So a man may be a very
good musician, and possess no auditory images. Yet Beethoven composed
his Ninth Symphony in 1823, when he had long been deaf; and he could
not even have helped his mental ear by the kinæsthesis of singing,
since without special education the deaf soon lose control of the
larynx. In his case, therefore, the auditory imagination must not only
have held good, but must also have grown more complex and more keenly
discriminative, up to the very end. No doubt, he was aided by the eye;
the symphony grew on paper, a theme at a time; and, no doubt also, he
used his general knowledge of what would sound aright and what would
not; he was a practised composer. But, when all allowance is made,
his main reliance must have been on auditory imagery, and this must
have remained as stable as auditory perception. Such instances prove
that _the idea of imagination runs a different course from the idea
of memory_. The memory-idea is common to all minds; it persists as
meaning, under the limitations of imaginal type and the general laws
of associative tendency. _The idea of imagination seems to depend
rather upon special endowment_; it persists in kind, also under the
limitations of imaginal type; and it is conserved by some special
grouping or ‘convergence’ of associative tendencies (p. 158). We do
not hesitate to describe a man as ‘wholly lacking in imagination,’
though we should look upon a total lack of memory as a sign of mental
incompetence; and the common phrase brings out, well enough, this
personal or idiosyncratic character of the idea of imagination.
§ 45. =The Pattern of Imagination.=—Imagination, like memory, may
occur in the state of primary or of secondary attention. In the former
case we call it receptive, in the latter case constructive imagination.
What happens in =receptive imagination= is, in principle, very simple.
We are confronted by new perceptions or ideas, and we supplement these
experiences by _complex images of the appropriate kind_. We read, for
instance, a traveller’s account of an African forest, and we picture
the forest as we read; we receive the score of a new song, and the
melody sings itself to us as we run our eye over the printed notes;
we stand upon an historic site, and rehearse in image the scenes
that it has witnessed. A certain definite direction is given to our
ideas by the presented stimuli; then the ideas, as they come in their
predetermined order, are supplemented in this imaginal way.
The characteristic _feeling of strangeness_, in such cases, is often
interfused with an experience which might, at first sight, seem
incompatible with it; the _’feeling’ of our own concernment_ in the
imagined situation. We have a natural tendency to feel ourselves into
what we perceive or imagine. As we read about the forest, we may, as
it were, _become_ the explorer; we feel for ourselves the gloom, the
silence, the humidity, the oppression, the sense of lurking danger;
everything is strange, but it is to us that the strange experience has
come. We are told of a shocking accident, and we gasp and shrink and
feel nauseated as we imagine it; we are told of some new and delightful
fruit, and our mouth waters as if we were about to taste it. This
tendency to feel oneself _into_ a situation is called =empathy=,—on
the analogy of sympathy, which is feeling _together with_ another; and
empathic ideas are psychologically interesting, because they are the
converse of perceptions: their core is imaginal, and their context is
made up of sensations, the kinæsthetic and organic sensations that
carry the empathic meaning. Like the feeling of strangeness, they are
characteristic of imagination. In memory, their place is taken by the
_imitative_ experiences, which repeat over again certain phases of the
original situation.
What happens in =constructive imagination= is not so easy to say.
Genius is defined sometimes as the capacity of doing great things
without effort, and sometimes as the capacity of taking infinite pains;
and constructive imagination, in the same way, is represented now as a
native gift that finds rather than seeks expression, and now as a sort
of skilled labour, a matter of planning and moulding and constructing.
There is probably truth on both sides, and a degree of truth that
varies with the individual make-up of the artist; in general, however,
there is more hard work and less inspiration than is usually supposed.
The poet or the inventor starts out with a more or less definite
plan or aim or ambition; and the plan persists, if only as a nervous
disposition, to determine the course of his ideas. It also helps to
initiate the imaginative complex, the first clue to which seems in fact
to come, at least ordinarily, as an inspiration, a happy thought; some
external situation, or some grouping of the associative tendencies that
is active at the moment, touches off the disposition, and the initial
idea flashes into mind. Whether this first idea is crude or complete,
and whether the stream of later ideas is broad or narrow, these things
depend altogether upon circumstances. Now, at any rate, begins the
stage of skilled labour; the idea is worked upon and worked over; the
plan decides what shall be accepted, what rejected, what put aside for
another trial; we are reminded of the course of recollection,—only
that rejection, active as it is in memory, is still more to the fore
in imagination, and construction is more critical than reconstruction.
Here and there other happy thoughts may crop up; but in essentials
this stage of hard work continues, until the idea attains its final
expression in objective terms, in the words of the poem, for instance,
or in the effective machine. Meantime, there have been all sorts of
feelings. The imaginative ideas bring with them their own feeling of
strangeness; but this may be overwhelmed by the joy of success or the
irritation of failure; and these feelings may themselves alternate,
swinging from extreme to extreme. Meantime, also, there have been
all sorts of empathic experiences, which have formed about the focal
processes, vivifying and personalising the partial products of the
constructive effort; and they too find their natural term in the actual
accomplishment of the imaginative task. Figurative, again, all this,
and lamentably far from scientific accuracy,—but, in broad outline and
on the average, we may hope that it is true to the psychological facts.
How, now, does the pattern of imagination compare with that of memory?
We saw that the memory-pattern is that of discursive movement within
fixed boundaries, the limits set by the fixity of the past occurrence
which is remembered. Imagination, on the other hand, is a more or
less steady flow, in a single direction, from the fountain-head of
disposition; there are no limits of any kind, save those of individual
capacity and experience; but the course is determined by the initial
plan or ambition. _Memory is discursive movement within fixed
boundaries; imagination is progressive movement from a constant source.
Memory is characterised by the feeling of familiarity and by imitative
kinæsthesis; imagination by the feeling of strangeness and by empathy._
Questions and Exercises
(1) Memory, like recognition, may be definite or indefinite, direct or
indirect. Can you give instances from your own experience?
(2) Suppose that you were required to write a defence of cramming.
Could you find materials in these two chapters?
(3) Memory fails as old age comes on; it decays, as we say, in old age;
and the course of decay is well-marked and uniform. Can you give any
account of it? And can you explain the course from statements made in
these two chapters?
(4) Do you think that memory can be improved? Be sure, before you
answer, that you have read a clear meaning into the question. Give
reasons for your answer.
(5) It has been said that we have no memory, but only memories. In what
sense or senses is this statement true?
(6) Memory has been described as a storehouse of ideas, as a power to
revive perceptions, as a universal function of organic matter, and as
decaying sense. Try to realise clearly what the users of these phrases
had in mind; say what you can in their favour; show in what respects
they are inadequate to the psychology of memory.
(7) Can you give instances of empathy, from your own experience: in
the reading of history or fiction, in the viewing of architecture
or landscape, in watching an actor or a musician or an athlete, in
day-dreaming? Describe as accurately as you can the different ‘feel’ of
empathy and sympathy; do not be satisfied with meanings.
(8) (_a_) Read Hawthorne’s preface to _The House of the Seven Gables_
and G. P. Lathrop’s Introduction. What light do they throw on the
mechanics of constructive imagination? (_b_) Read Poe’s essay on _The
Philosophy of Composition_. Is the writer’s psychology sound? Do you
take him to have been wholly sincere? Why? Be definite.
(9) It has been suggested that the pattern of constructive imagination
might be studied in the first drafts (where the manuscripts have been
preserved) of poems, especially of lyric poems. What have you to say to
the plan?
(10) Has imagination, in the ordinary sense, any place in science? Can
you justify your answer in psychological terms?
(11) A recent writer declares that “the idea of a centaur is a complex
mental picture composed of the ideas of man and horse.” The statement
is unpsychological in the highest degree. Why?
(12) What have you to say, from what you have learned of receptive
imagination, (_a_) of book-illustrations in general, (_b_) of
Cruikshank’s and Seymour’s and Browne’s illustrations of Dickens, and
(_c_) of an illustrated edition of George Meredith’s works?
References
Quintilian, Institutes of the Orator, bk. xi., ch. 2; G. H. Lewes,
Problems of Life and Mind, i., 1874, 229; W. James, Principles of
Psychology, i., 1890, ch. xvi.; E. Hering, On Memory, 1895; T. Ribot,
Diseases of Memory, 1882; Essay on the Creative Imagination, 1906;
E. B. Titchener, Text-book of Psychology, 1910, 396 ff.; a series of
articles by F. Kuhlmann, in American Journal of Psychology, 1905, 1907,
1909; Psychological Review, 1906; Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and
Scientific Methods, 1907; articles on Imagination, Memory, Mnemonic
Verses, in Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, 1901-2; article on
Cram, by W. S. Jevons, in Mind, ii., 1877, 193 ff.