CULTIVATING THE MEMORY.
Most of us forget, as Andrew Lang says, “with an ease and readiness
only to be acquired by practice,” and would agree with Montaigne that
“if I be a man of some reading, yet I am a man of no remembering.”
To recall what we read we must first of all pay attention to it.
Attention has been styled the mother of memory. It is naturally united
to interest, we attend best to what we care most about, but we may
watch over our minds and force them to return when they wander and
attention may be made habitual by repeated and vigorous efforts of the
will.
“There must be continuity of work,” says Thomas A. Edison, the
inventor, “when you set out to do a certain thing never let anything
disturb you from doing that. This power of putting the thought on one
particular thing, and keeping it there for hours at time, comes from
practice, and it takes a long while to get in the habit. I remember,
a long while ago, I could only think ten minutes on a given subject
before something else would come to my mind. But after long practice I
can now keep my mind for hours on one topic without being distracted
with thoughts of other matters.”
On the other hand those who find difficulty in focusing the mind for
long periods of time may be comforted by the following opinion of
Professor William James than whom there is no better authority on
matters of this kind: “The total mental efficiency of a man is the
resultant of the working together of all his faculties. He is too
complex a being for any one of them to have the casting vote. If any
one of them do have the casting vote, it is more likely to be the
strength of his desire and passion, the strength of the interest he
takes in what is proposed; concentration, memory, reasoning power,
inventiveness, excellence of the senses,--all are subsidiary to this.
No matter how scatter-brained the type of a man’s successive fields
of consciousness may be, if he really _care_ for a subject, he will
return to it incessantly from his incessant wanderings, and first and
last do more with it, and get more result from it, than another person
whose attention may be more continuous during a given interval, but
whose passion for the subject is of a more languid and less permanent
sort.”
We must have a clear idea of what we read if we wish to retain it. We
cannot remember perfectly what we do not understand. We must think
about what we read, assimilate it and unite it to the knowledge that
we already possess. Every time we go over it in our minds we make the
impression clearer.
Professor James lays special stress on the aid to memory that is
derived by this association of ideas. “When we wish to fix a new thing
in either our own mind or a pupil’s, our conscious effort should not be
so much to _impress_ and _retain_ it as to connect it with something
else already there. The ‘secret of a good memory’ is thus the secret
of forming diverse and multiple associations with every fact we care
to retain. But this forming of associations with a fact--what is it
but thinking _about_ the fact as much as possible? Briefly, then, of
two men with the same outward experiences, _the one who thinks over his
experiences most_, and weaves them into the most systematic relations
with each other, will be the one with the best memory.”
When we read a number of books on the same subject the memory is
helped by the association of ideas, and on the other hand we have high
authority for the statement that the memory is weakened by aimless
reading. There is perhaps no one pursuit in which so much precious
time is wasted, no one in which the energies of mankind are expended
to so little purpose, as in such reading. “Nothing, in truth,” says
Dugald Stewart, “has such a tendency to weaken not only the powers
of invention but the intellectual powers in general, as a habit of
extensive and various reading without reflection.”
The habit of sharing the results of reading is as useful to ourselves
as it is to others. The scholar of whom Chaucer wrote “gladly wolde he
lerne and gladly teche,” probably had no difficulty in remembering what
he read.
The reproduction of what you have read by conversation or by writing
aids the memory while strengthening the mind.
Faraday says, “I hold it as a great point in self-education that the
student should be continually engaged in forming exact ideas, and in
expressing them clearly by language.” Professor James remarks, “a
thing merely read or heard, and never verbally reproduced, contracts
the weakest possible adhesion in the mind. Verbal recitation or
reproduction is thus a highly important kind of reactive behavior on
our impressions.”
Moreover, while cultivating the memory, the reproduction of ideas
from the works of writers like Addison, Newman, and Matthew Arnold
is valuable in the formation of a clear and simple style. It was by
careful reading of Addison and by afterwards reproducing the thought in
his own language that Franklin when a boy formed the habit of elegant
and exact expression that made whatever he wrote interesting.