ON THE ABEYANCE OF MEMORY.
LET us assume, for the moment, that the action of each impregnate germ is
due to memory, which, as it were, pulsates anew in each succeeding
generation, so that immediately on impregnation, the germ’s memory
reverts to the last occasion on which it was in a like condition, and
recognising the position, is at no loss what to do. It is plain that in
all cases where there are two parents, that is to say, in the greater
number of cases, whether in the vegetable or animal kingdoms, there must
be two such last occasions, each of which will have an equal claim upon
the attention of the new germ. Its memory would therefore revert to
both, and though it would probably adhere more closely to the course
which it took either as its father or its mother, and thus come out
eventually male or female, yet it would be not a little influenced by the
less potent memory.
And not only this, but each of the germs to which the memory of the new
germ reverts, is itself imbued with the memories of its own parent germs,
and these again with the memories of preceding generations, and so on _ad
infinitum_; so that, _ex hypothesi_, the germ must become instinct with
all these memories, epitomised as after long time, and unperceived though
they may well be, not to say obliterated in part or entirely so far as
many features are concerned, by more recent impressions. In this case,
we must conceive of the impregnate germ as of a creature which has to
repeat a performance already repeated before on countless different
occasions, but with no more variation on the more recent ones than is
inevitable in the repetition of any performance by an intelligent being.
Now if we take the most parallel case to this which we can find, and
consider what we should ourselves do under such circumstances, that is to
say, if we consider what course is actually taken by beings who are
influenced by what we all call memory, when they repeat an already
often-repeated performance, and if we find a very strong analogy between
the course so taken by ourselves, and that which from whatever cause we
observe to be taken by a living germ, we shall surely be much inclined to
think that there must be a similarity in the causes of action in each
case; and hence, to conclude, that the action of the germ is due to
memory.
It will, therefore, be necessary to consider the general tendency of our
minds in regard to impressions made upon us, and the memory of such
impressions.
Deep impressions upon the memory are made in two ways, differing rather
in degree than kind, but with two somewhat widely different results.
They are made:—
I. By unfamiliar objects, or combinations, which come at comparatively
long intervals, and produce their effect, as it were, by one hard blow.
The effect of these will vary with the unfamiliarity of the impressions
themselves, and the manner in which they seem likely to lead to a further
development of the unfamiliar, _i.e._, with the question, whether they
seem likely to compel us to change our habits, either for better or
worse.
Thus, if an object or incident be very unfamiliar, as, we will say, a
whale or an iceberg to one travelling to America for the first time, it
will make a deep impression, though but little affecting our interests;
but if we struck against the iceberg and were shipwrecked, or nearly so,
it would produce a much deeper impression, we should think much more
about icebergs, and remember much more about them, than if we had merely
seen one. So, also, if we were able to catch the whale and sell its oil,
we should have a deep impression made upon us. In either case we see
that the amount of unfamiliarity, either present or prospective, is the
main determinant of the depth of the impression.
As with consciousness and volition, so with sudden unfamiliarity. It
impresses us more and more deeply the more unfamiliar it is, until it
reaches such a point of impressiveness as to make no further impression
at all; on which we then and there die. For death only kills through
unfamiliarity—that is to say, because the new position, whatever it is,
is so wide a cross as compared with the old one, that we cannot fuse the
two so as to understand the combination; hence we lose all recognition
of, and faith in, ourselves and our surroundings.
But however much we imagine we remember concerning the details of any
remarkable impression which has been made us by a single blow, we do not
remember as much or nearly as much as we think we do. The subordinate
details soon drop out of mind. Those who think they remember even such a
momentous matter as the battle of Waterloo recall now probably but
half-a-dozen episodes, a gleam here, and a gleam there, so that what they
call remembering the battle of Waterloo, is, in fact, little more than a
kind of dreaming—so soon vanishes the memory of any unrepeated
occurrence.
As for smaller impressions, there is very little of what happens to us in
each week that will be in our memories a week hence; a man of eighty
remembers few of the unrepeated incidents of his life beyond those of the
last fortnight, a little here, and a little there, forming a matter of
perhaps six weeks or two months in all, if everything that he can call to
mind were acted over again with no greater fulness than he can remember
it. As for incidents that have been often repeated, his mind strikes a
balance of its past reminiscences, remembering the two or three last
performances, and a general method of procedure, but nothing more.
If, then, the recollection of all that is not very novel, or very often
repeated, so soon fades from our own minds, during what we consider as
our single lifetime, what wonder that the details of our daily experience
should find no place in that brief epitome of them which is all we can
give in so small a volume as offspring?
If we cannot ourselves remember the hundred-thousandth part of what
happened to us during our own childhood, how can we expect our offspring
to remember more than what, through frequent repetition, they can now
remember as a residuum, or general impression. On the other hand,
whatever we remember in consequence of but a single impression, we
remember consciously. We can at will recall details, and are perfectly
well aware, when we do so, that we are recollecting. A man who has never
seen death looks for the first time upon the dead face of some near
relative or friend. He gazes for a few short minutes, but the impression
thus made does not soon pass out of his mind. He remembers the room, the
hour of the day or night, and if by day, what sort of a day. He
remembers in what part of the room, and how disposed the body of the
deceased was lying. Twenty years afterwards he can, at will, recall all
these matters to his mind, and picture to himself the scene as he
originally witnessed it.
The reason is plain; the impression was very unfamiliar, and affected the
beholder, both as regards the loss of one who was dear to him, and as
reminding him with more than common force that he will one day die
himself. Moreover the impression was a simple one, not involving much
subordinate detail; we have in this case, therefore, an example of the
most lasting kind of impression that can be made by a single unrepeated
event. But if we examine ourselves closely, we shall find that after a
lapse of years we do not remember as much as we think we do, even in such
a case as this; and that beyond the incidents above mentioned, and the
expression upon the face of the dead person, we remember little of what
we can so consciously and vividly recall.
II. Deep impressions are also made by the repetition, more or less
often, of a feeble impression which, if unrepeated, would have soon
passed out of our minds. We observe, therefore, that we remember best
what we have done least often—any unfamiliar deviation, that is to say,
from our ordinary method of procedure—and what we have done most often,
with which, therefore, we are most familiar; our memory being mainly
affected by the force of novelty and the force of routine—the most
unfamiliar, and the most familiar, incidents or objects.
But we remember impressions which have been made upon us by force of
routine, in a very different way to that in which we remember a single
deep impression. As regards this second class, which comprises far the
most numerous and important of the impressions with which our memory is
stored, it is often only by the fact of our performance itself that we
are able to recognise or show to others that we remember at all. We
often do not remember how, or when, or where we acquired our knowledge.
All we remember is, that we did learn, and that at one time and another
we have done this or that very often.
As regards this second class of impressions we may observe:—
1. That as a general rule we remember only the individual features of
the last few repetitions of the act—if, indeed, we remember this much.
The influence of preceding ones is to be found only in the general
average of the procedure, which is modified by them, but unconsciously to
ourselves. Take, for example, some celebrated singer, or pianoforte
player, who has sung the same air, or performed the same sonata several
hundreds or, it may be, thousands of times: of the details of individual
performances, he can probably call to mind none but those of the last few
days, yet there can be no question that his present performance is
affected by, and modified by, all his previous ones; the care he has
bestowed on these being the secret of his present proficiency.
In each performance (the performer being supposed in the same state of
mental and bodily health), the tendency will be to repeat the immediately
preceding performances more nearly than remoter ones. It is the common
tendency of living beings to go on doing what they have been doing most
recently. The last habit is the strongest. Hence, if he took great
pains last time, he will play better now, and will take a like degree of
pains, and play better still next time, and so go on improving while life
and vigour last. If, on the other hand, he took less pains last time, he
will play worse now, and be inclined to take little pains next time, and
so gradually deteriorate. This, at least, is the common everyday
experience of mankind.
So with painters, actors, and professional men of every description;
after a little while the memory of many past performances strikes a sort
of fused balance in the mind, which results in a general method of
procedure with but little conscious memory of even the latest
performances, and with none whatever of by far the greater number of the
remoter ones.
Still, it is noteworthy, that the memory of some even of these will
occasionally assert itself, so far as we can see, arbitrarily, the reason
why this or that occasion should still haunt us, when others like them
are forgotten, depending on some cause too subtle for our powers of
observation.
Even with such a simple matter as our daily dressing and undressing, we
may remember some few details of our yesterday’s toilet, but we retain
nothing but a general and fused recollection of the many thousand earlier
occasions on which we have dressed, or gone to bed. Men invariably put
the same leg first into their trousers—this is the survival of memory in
a residuum; but they cannot, till they actually put on a pair of
trousers, remember which leg they _do_ put in first; this is the rapid
fading away of any small individual impression.
The seasons may serve as another illustration; we have a general
recollection of the kind of weather which is seasonable for any month in
a year; what flowers are due about what time, and whether the spring is
on the whole backward or early; but we cannot remember the weather on any
particular day a year ago, unless some unusual incident has impressed it
upon our memory. We can remember, as a general rule, what kind of season
it was, upon the whole, a year ago, or perhaps, even two years; but more
than this, we rarely remember, except in such cases as the winter of
1854–1855, or the summer of 1868; the rest is all merged.
We observe, then, that as regards small and often repeated impressions,
our tendency is to remember best, and in most detail, what we have been
doing most recently, and what in general has occurred most recently, but
that the earlier impressions though forgotten individually, are
nevertheless, not wholly lost.
2. When we have done anything very often, and have got into the habit of
doing it, we generally take the various steps in the same order; in many
cases this seems to be a _sine quâ non_ for our repetition of the action
at all. Thus, there is probably no living man who could repeat the words
of “God save the Queen” backwards, without much hesitation and many
mistakes; so the musician and the singer must perform their pieces in the
order of the notes as written, or at any rate as they ordinarily perform
them; they cannot transpose bars or read them backwards, without being
put out, nor would the audience recognise the impressions they have been
accustomed to, unless these impressions are made in the accustomed order.
3. If, when we have once got well into the habit of doing anything in a
certain way, some one shows us some other way of doing it, or some way
which would in part modify our procedure, or if in our endeavours to
improve, we have hit upon some new idea which seems likely to help us,
and thus we vary our course, on the next occasion we remember this idea
by reason of its novelty, but if we try to repeat it, we often find the
residuum of our old memories pulling us so strongly into our old groove,
that we have the greatest difficulty in repeating our performance in the
new manner; there is a clashing of memories, a conflict, which if the
idea is very new, and involves, so to speak, too sudden a cross—too wide
a departure from our ordinary course—will sometimes render the
performance monstrous, or baffle us altogether, the new memory failing to
fuse harmoniously with the old. If the idea is not too widely different
from our older ones, we can cross them with it, but with more or less
difficulty, as a general rule in proportion to the amount of variation.
The whole process of understanding a thing consists in this, and, so far
as I can see at present, in this only.
Sometimes we repeat the new performance for a few times, in a way which
shows that the fusion of memories is still in force; and then insensibly
revert to the old, in which case the memory of the new soon fades away,
leaving a residuum too feeble to contend against that of our many earlier
memories of the same kind. If, however, the new way is obviously to our
advantage, we make an effort to retain it, and gradually getting into the
habit of using it, come to remember it by force of routine, as we
originally remembered it by force of novelty. Even as regards our own
discoveries, we do not always succeed in remembering our most improved
and most striking performances, so as to be able to repeat them at will
immediately: in any such performance we may have gone some way beyond our
ordinary powers, owing to some unconscious action of the mind. The
supreme effort has exhausted us, and we must rest on our oars a little,
before we make further progress; or we may even fall back a little,
before we make another leap in advance.
In this respect, almost every conceivable degree of variation is
observable, according to differences of character and circumstances.
Sometimes the new impression has to be made upon us many times from
without, before the earlier strain of action is eliminated; in this case,
there will long remain a tendency to revert to the earlier habit.
Sometimes, after the impression has been once made, we repeat our old way
two or three times, and then revert to the new, which gradually ousts the
old; sometimes, on the other hand, a single impression, though involving
considerable departure from our routine, makes its mark so deeply that we
adopt the new at once, though not without difficulty, and repeat it in
our next performance, and henceforward in all others; but those who vary
their performance thus readily will show a tendency to vary subsequent
performances according as they receive fresh ideas from others, or reason
them out independently. They are men of genius.
This holds good concerning all actions which we do habitually, whether
they involve laborious acquirement or not. Thus, if we have varied our
usual dinner in some way that leaves a favourable impression upon our
minds, so that our dinner may, in the language of the horticulturist, be
said to have “sported,” our tendency will be to revert to this particular
dinner either next day, or as soon as circumstances will allow, but it is
possible that several hundred dinners may elapse before we can do so
successfully, or before our memory reverts to this particular dinner.
4. As regards our habitual actions, however unconsciously we remember
them, we, nevertheless, remember them with far greater intensity than
many individual impressions or actions, it may be of much greater moment,
that have happened to us more recently. Thus, many a man who has
familiarised himself, for example, with the odes of Horace, so as to have
had them at his fingers’ ends as the result of many repetitions, will be
able years hence to repeat a given ode, though unable to remember any
circumstance in connection with his having learnt it, and no less unable
to remember when he repeated it last. A host of individual
circumstances, many of them not unimportant, will have dropped out of his
mind, along with a mass of literature read but once or twice, and not
impressed upon the memory by several repetitions; but he returns to the
well-known ode with so little effort, that he would not know that he was
remembering unless his reason told him so. The ode seems more like
something born with him.
We observe, also, that people who have become imbecile, or whose memory
is much impaired, yet frequently retain their power of recalling
impression which have been long ago repeatedly made upon them.
In such cases, people are sometimes seen to forget what happened last
week, yesterday, or an hour ago, without even the smallest power of
recovering their recollection; but the oft repeated earlier impression
remains, though there may be no memory whatever of how it came to be
impressed so deeply. The phenomena of memory, therefore, are exactly
like those of consciousness and volition, in so far as that the
consciousness of recollection vanishes, when the power of recollection
has become intense. When we are aware that we are recollecting, and are
trying, perhaps hard, to recollect, it is a sign that we do not recollect
utterly. When we remember utterly and intensely, there is no conscious
effort of recollection; our recollection can only be recognised by
ourselves and others, through our performance itself, which testifies to
the existence of a memory, that we could not otherwise follow or detect.
5. When circumstances have led us to change our habits of life—as when
the university has succeeded school, or professional life the
university—we get into many fresh ways, and leave many old ones. But on
revisiting the old scene, unless the lapse of time has been inordinately
great, we experience a desire to revert to old habits. We say that old
associations crowd upon us. Let a Trinity man, after thirty years
absence from Cambridge, pace for five minutes in the cloister of
Neville’s Court, and listen to the echo of his footfall, as it licks up
against the end of the cloister, or let an old Johnian stand wherever he
likes in the third Court of St. John’s, in either case he will find the
thirty years drop out of his life, as if they were half-an-hour; his life
will have rolled back upon itself, to the date when he was an
undergraduate, and his instinct will be to do almost mechanically,
whatever it would have come most natural to him to do, when he was last
there at the same season of the year, and the same hour of the day; and
it is plain this is due to similarity of environment, for if the place he
revisits be much changed, there will be little or no association.
So those who are accustomed at intervals to cross the Atlantic, get into
certain habits on board ship, different to their usual ones. It may be
that at home they never play whist; on board ship they do nothing else
all the evening. At home they never touch spirits; on the voyage they
regularly take a glass of something before they go to bed. They do not
smoke at home; here they are smoking all day. Once the voyage is at an
end, they return without an effort to their usual habits, and do not feel
any wish for cards, spirits, or tobacco. They do not remember yesterday,
when they did want all these things; at least, not with such force as to
be influenced by it in their desires and actions; their true memory—the
memory which makes them want, and do, reverts to the last occasion on
which they were in circumstances like their present; they therefore want
now what they wanted then, and nothing more; but when the time comes for
them to go on shipboard again, no sooner do they smell the smell of the
ship, than their real memory reverts to the times when they were last at
sea, and striking a balance of their recollections, they smoke, play
cards, and drink whisky and water.
We observe it then as a matter of the commonest daily occurrence within
our own experience, that memory does fade completely away, and recur with
the recurrence of surroundings like those which made any particular
impression in the first instance. We observe that there is hardly any
limit to the completeness and the length of time during which our memory
may remain in abeyance. A smell may remind an old man of eighty of some
incident of his childhood, forgotten for nearly as many years as he has
lived. In other words, we observe that when an impression has been
repeatedly made in a certain sequence on any living organism—that
impression not having been prejudicial to the creature itself—the
organism will have a tendency, on reassuming the shape and conditions in
which it was when the impression was last made, to remember the
impression, and therefore to do again now what it did then; all
intermediate memories dropping clean out of mind, so far as they have any
effect upon action.
6. Finally, we should note the suddenness and apparent caprice with
which memory will assert itself at odd times; we have been saying or
doing this or that, when suddenly a memory of something which happened to
us, perhaps in infancy, comes into our head; nor can we in the least
connect this recollection with the subject of which we have just been
thinking, though doubtless there has been a connection, too rapid and
subtle for our apprehension.
The foregoing phenomena of memory, so far as we can judge, would appear
to be present themselves throughout the animal and vegetable kingdoms.
This will be readily admitted as regards animals; as regards plants it
may be inferred from the fact that they generally go on doing what they
have been doing most lately, though accustomed to make certain changes at
certain points in their existence. When the time comes for these
changes, they appear to know it, and either bud forth into leaf or shed
their leaves, as the case may be. If we keep a bulb in a paper bag it
seems to remember having been a bulb before, until the time comes for it
to put forth roots and grow. Then, if we supply it with earth and
moisture, it seems to know where it is, and to go on doing now whatever
it did when it was last planted; but if we keep it in the bag too long,
it knows that it ought, according to its last experience, to be treated
differently, and shows plain symptoms of uneasiness; it is distracted by
the bag, which makes it remember its bulbhood, and also by the want of
earth and water, without which associations its memory of its previous
growth cannot be duly kindled. Its roots, therefore, which are most
accustomed to earth and water, do not grow; but its leaves, which do not
require contact with these things to jog their memory, make a more
decided effort at development—a fact which would seem to go strongly in
favour of the functional independence of the parts of all but the very
simplest living organisms, if, indeed, more evidence were wanted in
support of this.