become an object for succeeding states of mind, is as if it belonged to
another stream of thought. Or rather, it belongs only physically, not
intellectually, to its own stream, forming a bridge from one segment of
it to another, but not being appropriated inwardly by former segments
or appearing as part of the empirical self, in the manner explained in
Chapter X. All the intellectual value for us of a state of mind depends
on our after-memory of it. Only then is it combined in a system and
knowingly made to contribute to a result. Only then does it _count_ for
us. So that _the_ EFFECTIVE _consciousness we have of our states is the
after-consciousness_; and the more of this there is, the more influence
does the original state have, and the more permanent a factor is it
of our world. An indelibly-imprinted pain may color a life; but, as
Professor Richet says:
"To suffer for only a hundredth of a second is not to suffer at all;
and for my part I would readily agree to undergo a pain, however acute
and intense it might be, provided it should last only a hundredth of a
second, and leave after it neither reverberation nor recall."[567]
Not that a momentary state of consciousness need be practically
resultless. Far from it: such a state, though absolutely unremembered,
might at its own moment determine the transition of our thinking in a
vital way, and decide our action irrevocably.[568] But the _idea_ of it
could not _afterwards_ determine transition and action, its content
could not be conceived as one of the mind's permanent meanings: that is
all I mean by saying that its intellectual value lies in after-memory.
As a rule sensations outlast for some little time the objective
stimulus which occasioned them. This phenomenon is the ground of
those 'after-images' which are familiar in the physiology of the
sense-organs. If we open our eyes instantaneously upon a scene, and
then shroud them in complete darkness, it will be as if we saw the
scene in ghostly light through the dark screen. We can read off details
in it which were unnoticed whilst the eyes were open.[569]
In every sphere of sense, an intermittent stimulus, often enough
repeated, produces a continuous sensation. This is because the
after-image of the impression just gone by blends with the new
impression coming in. The effects of stimuli may thus be superposed
upon each other many stages deep, the total result in consciousness
being an increase in the feeling's intensity, and in all probability,
as we saw in the last chapter, an elementary sense of the lapse of time
(see p. 635).
Exner writes:
"Impressions to which we are inattentive leave so brief an image
in the memory that it is usually overlooked. When deeply absorbed,
we do not hear the clock strike. But our attention may awake after
the striking has ceased, and we may then count off the strokes.
Such examples are often found in daily life. We can also prove the
existence of this _primary memory-image_, as it may be called, in
another person, even when his attention is completely absorbed
elsewhere. Ask someone, e.g., to count the lines of a printed page
as fast as he can, and whilst this is going on walk a few steps
about the room. Then, when the person has done counting, ask him
where you stood. He will always reply quite definitely that you have
walked. Analogous experiments may be made with vision. This primary
memory-image is, whether attention have been turned to the impression
or not, an extremely lively one, but is subjectively quite distinct
from every sort of after-image or hallucination.... It vanishes, if
not caught by attention, in the course of a few seconds. Even when the
original impression is attended to, the liveliness of its image in
memory fades fast."[570]
The physical condition in the nerve-tissue of this primary memory is
called by Richet 'elementary memory.'[571] I much prefer to reserve
the word memory for the conscious phenomenon. What happens in the
nerve-tissue is but an example of that plasticity or of semi-inertness,
yielding to change, but not yielding instantly or wholly, and never
quite recovering the original form, which, in Chapter V, we saw to
be the groundwork of habit. Elementary _habit_ would be the better
name for what Professor Richet means. Well, the first manifestation
of elementary habit is the slow dying away of an impressed movement
on the neural matter, and its first effect in consciousness is this
so-called elementary memory. But what elementary memory makes us aware
of is the _just_ past. The objects we feel in this directly intuited
past differ from properly recollected objects. An object which is
recollected, in the proper sense of that term, is one which has been
absent from consciousness altogether, and now revives anew. It is
brought back, recalled, fished up, so to speak, from a reservoir in
which, with countless other objects, it lay buried and lost from view.
But an object of primary memory is not thus brought back; it never
was lost; its date was never cut off in consciousness from that of
the immediately present moment. In fact it comes to us as belonging
to the rearward portion of the present space of time, and not to the
genuine past. In the last chapter we saw that the portion of time which
we directly intuit has a breadth of several seconds, a rearward and a
forward end, and may be called the specious present. All stimuli whose
first nerve-vibrations have not yet ceased seem to be conditions of our
getting this feeling of the specious present. They give rise to objects
which appear to the mind as events just past.[572]
When we have been exposed to an unusual stimulus for many minutes or
hours, a nervous process is set up which results in the haunting of
consciousness by the impression for a long time afterwards. The tactile
and muscular feelings of a day of skating or riding, after long disuse
of the exercise, will come back to us all through the night. Images
of the field of view of the microscope will annoy the observer for
hours after an unusually long sitting at the instrument. A thread tied
around the finger, an unusual constriction in the clothing, will feel
as if still there, long after they have been removed. These revivals
(called phenomena of _Sinnesgedächtniss_ by the Germans) have something
periodical in their nature.[573] They show that profound rearrangements
and slow settlings into a new equilibrium are going on in the neural
substance, and they form the transition to that more peculiar and
proper phenomenon of memory, of which the rest of this chapter must
treat. The first condition which makes a thing susceptible of recall
after it has been forgotten is that the original impression of it
should have been prolonged enough to give rise to a _recurrent_ image
of it, as distinguished from one of those primary after-images which
very fleeting impressions may leave behind, and which contain in
themselves no guarantee that they will ever come back after having
once faded away.[574] A certain length of stimulation seems demanded
by the inertia of the nerve-substance. Exposed to a shorter influence,
its modification fails to 'set,' and it retains no effective tendency
to fall again into the same form of vibration at which the original
feeling was due. This, as I said at the outset, may be the reason why
only 'substantive' and not 'transitive' states of mind are as a rule
recollected, at least as independent things. The transitive states pass
by too quickly.
ANALYSIS OF THE PHENOMENON OF MEMORY.
Memory proper, or secondary memory as it might be styled, is the
knowledge of a former state of mind after it has already once dropped
from consciousness; or rather _it is the knowledge of an event,
or fact,_ of which meantime we have not been thinking, _with the
additional consciousness that we have thought or experienced it
before._
The first element which such a knowledge involves would seem to be the
revival in the mind of an image or copy of the original event.[575] And
it is an assumption made by many writers[576] that the revival of an
image is all that is needed to constitute the memory of the original
occurrence. But such a revival is obviously not a _memory_, whatever
else it may be; it is simply a duplicate, a second event, having
absolutely no connection with the first event except that it happens
to resemble it. The clock strikes to-day; it struck yesterday; and
may strike a million times ere it wears out. The rain pours through
the gutter this week; it did so last week; and will do so _in sæcula
sæculorum_. But does the present clock-stroke become aware of the
past ones, or the present stream recollect the past stream, because
they repeat and resemble them? Assuredly not. And let it not be said
that this is because clock-strokes and gutters are physical and not
psychical objects; for psychical objects (sensations for example)
simply recurring in successive editions will remember each other _on
that account_ no more than clock-strokes do. No memory is involved in
the mere fact of recurrence. The successive editions of a feeling are
so many independent events, each snug in its own skin. Yesterday's
feeling is dead and buried; and the presence of to-day's is no reason
why it should resuscitate. A farther condition is required before the
present image can be held to stand for a _past original_.
That condition is that the fact imaged be _expressly referred to the
past_, thought as _in the past_. But how can we think a thing as in
the past, except by thinking of the past together with the thing,
and of the relation of the two? And how can we think of the past? In
the chapter on Time-perception we have seen that our intuitive or
immediate consciousness of pastness hardly carries us more than a
few seconds backward of the present instant of time. Remoter dates
are conceived, not perceived; known symbolically by names, such as
'last week,' '1850;' or thought of by events which happened in them,
as the year in which we attended such a school, or met with such a
loss.--So that if we wish to think of a particular past epoch, we must
think of a name or other symbol, or else of certain concrete events,
associated therewithal. Both must be thought of, to think the past
epoch adequately. And to 'refer' any special fact to the past epoch is
to think that fact _with_ the names and events which characterize its
date, to think it, in short, with a lot of contiguous associates.
But even this would not be memory. Memory requires more than mere
dating of a fact in the past. It must be dated in _my_ past. In other
words, I must think that I directly experienced its occurrence. It must
have that 'warmth and intimacy' which were so often spoken of in the
chapter on the Self, as characterizing all experiences 'appropriated'
by the thinker as his own.
A general feeling of the past direction in time, then, a particular
date conceived as lying along that direction, and I defined by its name
or phenomenal contents, an event imagined as located therein, and owned
as part of my experience,--such are the elements of every act of memory.
It follows that what we began by calling the 'image,' or 'copy,' of
the fact in the mind, is really not there at all in that simple shape,
as a separate 'idea.' Or at least, if it be there as a separate idea,
no memory will go with it. What memory goes with is, on the contrary,
a very complex representation, that of the fact to be recalled _plus_
its associates, the whole forming one 'object' (as explained on page
275, Chapter IX), known in one integral pulse of consciousness (as set
forth on pp. 276 ff.) and demanding probably a vastly more intricate
brain-process than that on which any simple sensorial image depends.
Most psychologists have given a perfectly clear analysis of the
phenomenon we describe. Christian Wolff, for example, writes:
"Suppose you have seen Mevius in the temple, but now afresh in Titus'
house. I say you _recognize_ Mevius, that is, are conscious of having
seen him before because, although now you perceive him with your
senses along with Titus' house, your imagination produces an image of
him along with one of the temple, and of the acts of your own mind
reflecting on Mevius in the temple. Hence the idea of Mevius which is
reproduced in sense is contained in another series of perceptions than
that which formerly contained it, and this difference is the reason
why we are conscious of having had it before.... For whilst now you
see Mevius in the house of Titus, your imagination places him in the
temple, and renders you conscious of the state of mind which you found
in yourself when you beheld him there. By this you know that you have
seen him before, that is, you recognize him. But you recognize him
because his idea is now contained in another series of perceptions
from that in which you first saw him."[577]
Similarly James Mill writes:
"In my remembrance of George III., addressing the two houses of
parliament, there is, first of all, the mere idea, or simple
apprehension, the conception, as it is sometimes called, of the
objects. There is combined with this, to make it memory, my idea of my
having seen and heard those objects. And this combination is so close
that it is not in my power to separate them. I cannot have the idea of
George III.: his person and attitude, the paper he held in his hand,
the sound of his voice while reading from it; without having the other
idea along with it, that of my having been a witness of the scene....
If this explanation of the case in which we remember sensations is
understood, the explanation of the case in which we remember ideas
cannot occasion much of difficulty. I have a lively recollection of
Polyphemus's cave, and the actions of Ulysses and the Cyclops, as
described by Homer. In this recollection there is, first of all, the
ideas, or simple conceptions of the objects and acts; and along with
these ideas, and so closely combined as not to be separable, the idea
of my having formerly had those same ideas. And this idea of my having
formerly had those ideas is a very complicated idea; including the
idea of myself of the present moment remembering, and that of myself
of the past moment conceiving; and the whole series of the states of
consciousness, which intervened between myself remembering, and myself
conceiving."[578]
Memory is then the feeling of belief in a peculiar complex object;
but all the elements of this object may be known to other states
of belief; nor is there in the particular combination of them as
they appear in memory anything so peculiar as to lead us to oppose
the latter to other sorts of thought as something altogether _sui
generis_, needing a special faculty to account for it. When later
we come to our chapter on Belief we shall see that any represented
object which is connected either mediately or immediately with our
present sensations or emotional activities tends to be believed in as
a reality. The sense of a peculiar active relation in it to ourselves
is what gives to an object the characteristic quality of reality, and a
merely imagined past event differs from a recollected one only in the
absence of this peculiar-feeling relation. The electric current, so to
speak, between it and our present self does not close. But in their
other determinations the re-recollected past and the imaginary past
may be much the same. In other words, there is nothing unique in the
_object_ of memory, and no special faculty is needed to account for its
formation. It is a synthesis of parts thought of as related together,
perception, imagination, comparison and reasoning being analogous
syntheses of parts into complex objects. The objects of any of these
faculties may awaken belief or fail to awaken it; _the object of memory
is only an object imagined in the past_ (usually very completely
imagined there) _to which the emotion of belief adheres._
MEMORY'S CAUSES.
Such being the _phenomenon_ of memory, or the analysis of its object,
can we see how it comes to pass? can we lay bare its causes?
Its complete exercise presupposes two things:
1) The _retention_ of the remembered fact;
2) Its _reminiscence, recollection, reproduction,_ or _recall_.
Now _the cause both of retention and of recollection is the law of
habit in the nervous system, working as it does in the 'association of
ideas.'_
Associationists have long explained _recollection_ by association.
James Mill gives an account of it which I am unable to improve upon,
unless it might be by translating his word 'idea' into 'thing thought
of,' or 'object,' as explained so often before.
"There is," he says, "a state of mind familiar to all men, in which
we are said to remember. In this state it is certain we have not in
the mind the idea which we are trying to have in it.[579] How is
it, then, that we proceed in the course of our endeavor, to procure
its introduction into the mind? If we have not the idea itself, we
have certain ideas connected with it. We run over those ideas, one
after another, in hopes that some one of them will suggest the idea
we are in quest of; and if any one of them does, it is always one
so connected with it as to call it up in the way of association. I
meet an old acquaintance, whose name I do not remember, and wish to
recollect. I run over a number of names, in hopes that some of them
may be associated with the idea of the individual. I think of all
the circumstances in which I have seen him engaged; the time when I
knew him, the persons along with whom I knew him, the things he did,
or the things he suffered; and, if I chance upon any idea with which
the name is associated, then immediately I have the recollection; if
not, my pursuit of it is vain.[580] There is another set of cases,
very familiar, but affording very important evidence on the subject.
It frequently happens that there are matters which we desire not
to forget. What is the contrivance to which we have recourse for
preserving the memory--that is, for making sure that it will be called
into existence, when it is our wish that it should? All men invariably
employ the same expedient. They endeavor to form an association
between the idea of the thing to be remembered, and some sensation,
or some idea, which they know beforehand will occur at or near the
time when they wish the remembrance to be in their minds. If this
association is formed, and the association or idea with which it has
been formed occurs; the sensation, or idea, calls up the remembrance;
and the object of him who formed the association is attained. To use
a vulgar instance: a man receives a commission from his friend, and,
that he may not forget it, ties a knot in his handkerchief. How is
this fact to be explained? First of all, the idea of the commission
is associated with the making of the knot. Next, the handkerchief is
a thing which it is known beforehand will be frequently seen, and of
course at no great distance of time from the occasion on which the
memory is desired. The handkerchief being seen, the knot is seen, and
this sensation recalls the idea of the commission, between which and
itself the association had been purposely formed."[581]
In short, we make search in our memory for a forgotten idea, just as
we rummage our house for a lost object. In both cases we visit what
seems to us the probable _neighborhood_ of that which we miss. We turn
over the things under which, or within which, or alongside of which,
it may possibly be; and if it lies near them, it soon comes to view.
But these matters, in the case of a mental object sought, are nothing
but its _associates_. The machinery of recall is thus the same as the
machinery of association, and the machinery of association, as we know,
is nothing but the elementary law of habit in the nerve-centres.
And this same law of habit is the machinery of retention also.
Retention means _liability_ to recall, and it means nothing more than
such liability. The only proof of there being retention is that recall
actually takes place. The retention of an experience is, in short,
but another name for the _possibility_ of thinking it again, or the
_tendency_ to think it again, with its past surroundings. Whatever
accidental cue may turn this tendency into an actuality, the permanent
_ground_ of the tendency itself lies in the organized neural paths by
which the cue calls up the experience on the proper occasion, together
with its past associates, the sense that the self was there, the belief
that it really happened, etc., etc., just as previously described.
When the recollection is of the 'ready' sort, the resuscitation takes
place the instant the occasion arises; when it is slow, resuscitation
comes after delay. But be the recall prompt or slow, the condition
which makes it possible at all (or in other words, the 'retention' of
the experience) is neither more nor less than the brain-paths which
_associate_ the experience with the occasion and cue of the recall.
_When slumbering, these paths are the condition of retention; when
active, they are the condition of recall._
* * * * *
[Illustration: FIG. 45.]
A simple scheme will now make the whole cause of memory plain. Let _n_
be a past event; _o_ its 'setting' (concomitants, date, self present,
warmth and intimacy, etc., etc., as already set forth); and _m_ some
present thought or fact which may appropriately become the occasion of
its recall. Let the nerve-centres, active in the thought of _m, n,_ and
_o,_ be represented by M, N, and O, respectively; then the _existence_
of the paths M--N and N--O will be the fact indicated by the phrase
'retention of the event _n_ in the memory,' and the _excitement_ of
the brain along these paths will be the condition of the event _n_'s
actual recall. The _retention_ of _n_, it will be observed, is no
mysterious storing up of an 'idea' in an unconscious state. It is not
a fact of the mental order at all. It is a purely physical phenomenon,
a morphological feature, the presence of these 'paths,' namely, in the
finest recesses of the brain's tissue. The recall or recollection, on
the other hand, is a _psycho-physical_ phenomenon, with both a bodily
and a mental side. The bodily side is the functional excitement of the
tracts and paths in question; the mental side is the conscious vision
of the past occurrence, and the belief that we experienced it before.
These habit-worn paths of association are a clear rendering of what
authors mean by 'predispositions,' 'vestiges,' 'traces,' etc., left in
the brain by past experience. Most writers leave the nature of these
vestiges vague; few think of explicitly assimilating them to channels
of association. Dr. Maudsley, for example, writes:
"When an idea which we have once had is excited again, there is
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 recognition 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."[582]
In this passage Dr. Maudsley seems to mean by the 'nerve-element,' or
'anatomical substratum of fibres and cells,' something that corresponds
to the N of our diagram. And the 'modification' he speaks of seems
intended to be understood as an internal modification of this same
particular group of elements. Now the slightest reflection will
convince anyone that there is no conceivable ground for supposing that
with the mere re-excitation of N there should arise the 'conscious
addition' that it is a re-excitation. The two excitations are simply
two excitations, their consciousnesses are two consciousnesses, they
have nothing to do with each other. And a vague 'modification,'
supposed to be left behind by the first excitation, helps us not a
whit. For, according to all analogy, such a modification can only
result in making the next excitation more smooth and rapid. This might
make it less _conscious_, perhaps, but could not endow it with any
reference to the past. The gutter is worn deeper by each successive
shower, but not for that reason brought into contact with previous
showers. Psychology (which Dr. Maudsley in his next sentence says
"affords us not the least help in this matter") puts us on the track of
an at least possible brain-explanation. As it is the _setting o_ of the
idea, when it recurs, which makes us conscious of it as past, so it can
be no _intrinsic_ modification of the 'nerve-element' N which is the
organic condition of memory, but something extrinsic to it altogether,
namely, its connections with those other nerve-elements which we called
O--that letter standing in the scheme for the cerebral substratum of
a great plexus of things other than the principal event remembered,
dates, names, concrete surroundings, realized intervals, and what not.
The 'modification' is the formation in the plastic nerve-substance of
the system of associative paths between N and O.
The only hypothesis, in short, to which the facts of inward experience
give countenance is that _the brain-tracts excited by the event proper,
and those excited in its recall, are in part different from each
other_. If we could revive the past event without any associates we
should exclude the possibility of memory, and simply dream that we were
undergoing the experience as if for the first time.[583] Wherever, in
fact, the recalled event does appear without a definite setting, it is
hard to distinguish it from a mere creation of fancy. But in proportion
as its image lingers and recalls associates which gradually become more
definite, it grows more and more distinctly into a remembered thing.
For example, I enter a friend's room and see on the wall a painting.
At first I have the strange, wondering consciousness, 'surely I have
seen that before,' but when or how does not become clear. There only
clings to the picture a sort of penumbra of familiarity,--when suddenly
I exclaim: "I have it, it is a copy of part of one of the Fra Angelicos
in the Florentine Academy--I recollect it there!" But the motive to
the recall does _not_ lie in the fact that the brain-tract now excited
by the painting was once before excited in a similar way; it lies
simply and solely in the fact that with that brain-tract other tracts
also are excited: those which sustain my friend's room with all its
peculiarities, on the one hand; those which sustain the mental image of
the Florence Academy, on the other hand, with the circumstances of my
visit there; and finally those which make me (more dimly) think of the
years I have lived through between these two times. The result of this
total brain-disturbance is a thought with a peculiar object, namely,
that I who now stand here with this picture before me, stood so many
years ago in the Florentine Academy looking at its original.
M. Taine has described the gradual way in which a mental image develops
into an object of memory, in his usual vivid fashion. He says:
"I meet casually in the street a person whose appearance I am
acquainted with, and say to myself at once that I have seen him
before. Instantly the figure recedes into the past, and wavers about
there vaguely, without at once fixing itself in any spot. It persists
in me for some time, and surrounds itself with new details. 'When
I saw him he was bare-headed, with a working-jacket on, painting in
a studio; he is so-and-so, of such-and-such a street. But when was
it? It was not yesterday, nor this week, nor recently. I have it: he
told me that he was waiting for the first leaves to come out to go
into the country. It was before the spring. But at what exact date?
I saw, the same day, people carrying branches in the streets and
omnibuses: it was Palm Sunday!' Observe the travels of the internal
figure, its various shiftings to front and rear along the line of the
past; each of these mental sentences has been a swing of the balance.
When confronted with the present sensation and with the latent swarm
of indistinct images which repeat our recent life, the figure first
recoiled suddenly to an indeterminate distance. Then, completed by
precise details, and confronted with all the shortened images by
which we sum up the proceedings of a day or a week, it again receded
beyond the present day, beyond yesterday, the day before, the week,
still farther, beyond the ill-defined mass constituted by our recent
recollections. Then something said by the painter was recalled, and it
at once receded again beyond an almost precise limit, which is marked
by the image of the green leaves and denoted by the word spring. A
moment afterwards, thanks to a new detail, the recollection of the
branches, it has shifted again, but forward this time, not backward;
and, by a reference to the calendar, is situated at a precise point,
a week further back than Easter, and five weeks nearer than the
carnival, by the double effect of the contrary impulsions, pushing it,
one forward and the other backward, and which are, at a particular
moment, annulled by one another."[584]
THE CONDITIONS OF GOODNESS IN MEMORY.
The remembered fact being _n_, then, the path N--O is what arouses
for _n_ its setting when it _is_ recalled, and makes it other than a
mere imagination. The path M--N, on the other hand, gives the cue or
occasion of its being recalled at all. _Memory being this altogether
conditioned on brain-paths, its excellence in a given individual will
depend partly on the number and partly on the persistence of these
paths._
The persistence or permanence of the paths is a physiological
property of the brain-tissue of the individual, whilst their number
is altogether due to the facts of his mental experience. Let the
quality of permanence in the paths be called the native tenacity, or
physiological retentiveness. This tenacity differs enormously from
infancy to old age, and from one person to another. Some minds are like
wax under a seal--no impression, however disconnected with others,
is wiped out. Others, like a jelly, vibrate to every touch, but under
usual conditions retain no permanent mark. These latter minds, before
they can recollect a fact, must weave it into their permanent stores
of knowledge. They have no _desultory_ memory. Those persons, on the
contrary, who retain names, dates and addresses, anecdotes, gossip,
poetry, quotations, and all sorts of miscellaneous facts, without an
effort, have desultory memory in a high degree, and certainly owe it
to the unusual tenacity of their brain-substance for any path once
formed therein. No one probably was ever effective on a voluminous
scale without a high degree of this physiological retentiveness. In the
practical as in the theoretic life, the man whose acquisitions _stick_
is the man who is always achieving and advancing, whilst his neighbors,
spending most of their time in relearning what they once knew but have
forgotten, simply hold their own. A Charlemagne, a Luther, a Leibnitz,
a Walter Scott, any example, in short, of your quarto or folio editions
of mankind, must needs have amazing retentiveness of the purely
physiological sort. Men without this retentiveness may excel in the
_quality_ of their work at this point or at that, but will never do
such mighty sums of it, or be influential contemporaneously on such a
scale.[585]
But there comes a time of life for all of us when we can do no more
than hold our own in the way of acquisitions, when the old paths fade
as fast as the new ones form in our brain, and when we forget in a
week quite as much as we can learn in the same space of time. This
equilibrium may last many, many years. In extreme old age it is upset
in the reverse direction, and forgetting prevails over acquisition or
rather there is no acquisition. Brain-paths are so transient that in
the course of a few minutes of conversation the same question is asked
and its answer forgotten half a dozen times. Then the superior tenacity
of the paths formed in childhood becomes manifest: the dotard will
retrace the facts of his earlier years after he has lost all those of
later date.
So much for the permanence of the paths. Now for their number.
It is obvious that the more there are of such paths as M--N in the
brain, and the more of such possible cues or occasions for the recall
of _n_ in the mind, the prompter and surer, on the whole, the memory
of _n_ will be, the more frequently one will be reminded of it, the
more avenues of approach to it one will possess. In mental terms, _the
more other facts a fact is associated with in the mind, the better
possession of it our memory retains._ Each of its associates becomes
a hook to which it hangs, a means to fish it up by when sunk beneath
the surface. Together, they form a network of attachments by which it
is woven into the entire tissue of our thought. 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
and the same amount of mere native tenacity, _the one who_ THINKS _over
his experiences most,_ and weaves them into systematic relations with
each other, _will be the one with the best memory_. We see examples of
this on every hand. Most men have a good memory for facts connected
with their own pursuits. The college athlete who remains a dunce at
his books will astonish you by his knowledge of men's 'records' in
various feats and games, and will be a walking dictionary of sporting
statistics. The reason is that he is constantly going over these things
in his mind, and comparing and making series of them. They form for
him not so many odd facts, but a concept-system--so they stick. So the
merchant remembers prices, the politician other politicians' speeches
and votes, with a copiousness which amazes outsiders, but which the
amount of thinking they bestow on these subjects easily explains. The
great memory for facts which a Darwin and a Spencer reveal in their
books is not incompatible with the possession on their part of a brain
with only a middling degree of physiological retentiveness. Let a
man early in life set himself the task of verifying such a theory as
that of evolution, and facts will soon cluster and cling to him like
grapes to their stem. Their relations to the theory will hold them
fast; and the more of these the mind is able to discern, the greater
the erudition will become. Meanwhile the theorist may have little, if
any, desultory memory. Unutilizable facts may be unnoted by him and
forgotten as soon as heard. An ignorance almost as encyclopædic as his
erudition may coexist with the latter, and hide, as it were, in the
interstices of its web. Those who have had much to do with scholars and
_savants_ will readily think of examples of the class of mind I mean.
In a system, every fact is connected with every other by some
thought-relation. The consequence is that every fact is retained by the
combined suggestive power of all the other facts in the system, and
forgetfulness is well-nigh impossible.
The reason why _cramming_ is such a bad mode of study is now made
clear. I mean by cramming that way of preparing for examinations by
committing 'points' to memory during a few hours or days of intense
application immediately preceding the final ordeal, little or no work
having been performed during the previous course of the term. Things
learned thus in a few hours, on one occasion, for one purpose, cannot
possibly have formed many associations with other things in the mind.
Their brain-processes are led into by few paths, and are relatively
little liable to be awakened again. Speedy oblivion is the almost
inevitable fate of all that is committed to memory in this simple
way. Whereas, on the contrary, the same materials taken in gradually,
day after day, recurring in different contexts, considered in various
relations, associated with other external incidents, and repeatedly
reflected on, grow into such a system, form such connections with the
rest of the mind's fabric, lie open to so many paths of approach, that
they remain permanent possessions. This is the _intellectual_ reason
why habits of continuous application should be enforced in educational
establishments. Of course there is no moral turpitude in cramming. If
it led to the desired end of secure learning it would be infinitely the
best method of study. But it does not; and students themselves should
understand the reason why.
ONE'S NATIVE RETENTIVENESS IS UNCHANGEABLE.
It will now appear clear that _all improvement of the memory lies in
the line of_ ELABORATING THE ASSOCIATES of each of the several things
to be remembered. _No amount of culture would seem capable of modifying
a man's_ GENERAL _retentiveness_. This is a physiological quality,
given once for all with his organization, and which he can never hope
to change. It differs no doubt in disease and health; and it is a fact
of observation that it is better in fresh and vigorous hours than when
we are fagged or ill. We may say, then, that a man's native tenacity
will fluctuate somewhat with his hygiene, and that whatever is good
for his tone of health will also be good for his memory. We may even
say that whatever amount of intellectual exercise is bracing to the
general tone and nutrition of the brain will also be profitable to the
general retentiveness. But more than this we cannot say; and this, it
is obvious, is far less than most people believe.
It is, in fact, commonly thought that certain exercises, systematically
repeated, will strengthen, not only a man's remembrance of the
particular facts used in the exercises, but his faculty for remembering
facts at large. And a plausible case is always made out by saying
that practice in learning words by heart makes it easier to learn new
words in the same way.[586] If this be true, then what I have just
said is false, and the whole doctrine of memory as due to 'paths'
must be revised. But I am disposed to think the alleged fact untrue.
I have carefully questioned several mature actors on the point, and
all have denied that the practice of learning parts has made any such
difference as is alleged. What it has done for them is to improve their
power of _studying_ a part systematically. Their mind is now full of
precedents in the way of intonation, emphasis, gesticulation; the new
words awaken distinct suggestions and decisions; are caught up, in
fact, into a pre-existing net-work, like the merchant's prices, or the
athlete's store of 'records,' and are recollected easier, although
the mere native tenacity is not a whit improved, and is usually, in
fact, impaired by age. It is a case of better remembering by better
_thinking_. Similarly when schoolboys improve by practice in ease of
learning by heart, the improvement will, I am sure, be always found
to reside in the _mode of study of the particular piece_ (due to the
greater interest, the greater suggestiveness, the generic similarity
with other pieces, the more sustained attention, etc., etc.), and not
at all to any enhancement of the brute retentive power.
The error I speak of pervades an otherwise useful and judicious book,
'How to Strengthen the Memory,' by Dr. Holbrook of New York.[587]
The author fails to distinguish between the general physiological
retentiveness and the retention of particular things, and talks as if
both must be benefited by the same means.
"I am now treating," he says, "a case of loss of memory in a person
advanced in years, who did not know that his memory had failed most
remarkably till I told him of it. He is making vigorous efforts to
bring it back again, and with partial success. The method pursued is
to spend two hours daily, one in the morning and one in the evening,
in exercising this faculty. The patient is instructed to give the
closest attention to all that he learns, so that it shall be impressed
on his mind clearly. He is asked to recall every evening all the
facts and experiences of the day, and again the next morning. Every
name heard is written down and impressed on his mind clearly, and an
effort made to recall it at intervals. Ten names from among public men
are ordered to be committed to memory every week. A verse of poetry
is to be learned, also a verse from the Bible, daily. He is asked to
remember the number of the page in any book where any interesting
fact is recorded. These and other methods are slowly resuscitating a
failing memory."[588]
I find it very hard to believe that the memory of the poor old
gentleman is a bit the better for all this torture except in respect of
the particular facts thus wrought into it, the occurrences attended to
and repeated on those days, the names of those politicians, those Bible
verses, etc., etc. In another place Dr. Holbrook quotes the account
given by the late Thurlow Weed, journalist and politician, of his
method of strengthening his memory.
"My memory was a sieve. I could remember nothing. Dates, names,
appointments, faces--everything escaped me. I said to my wife,
'Catherine, I shall never make a successful politician, for I cannot
remember, and that is a prime necessity of politicians.' My wife
told me I must train my memory. So when I came home that night, I
sat down alone and spent fifteen minutes trying silently to recall
with accuracy the principal events of the day. I could remember but
little at first; now I remember that I could not then recall what I
had for breakfast. After a few days' practice I found I could recall
more. Events came back to me more minutely, more accurately, and more
vividly than at first. After a fortnight or so of this, Catherine
said, 'Why don't you relate to me the events of the day, instead of
recalling them to yourself? It would be interesting, and my interest
in it would be a stimulus to you.' Having great respect for my wife's
opinion, I began a habit of oral confession, as it were, which was
continued for almost fifty years. Every night, the last thing before
retiring, I told her everything I could remember that had happened to
me or about me during the day. I generally recalled the dishes I had
had for breakfast, dinner, and tea; the people I had seen and what
they had said; the editorials I had written for my paper, giving her
a brief abstract of them. I mentioned all the letters I had sent and
received, and the very language used, as nearly as possible; when
I had walked or ridden--I told her everything that had come within
my observation. I found I could say my lessons better and better
every year, and instead of the practice growing irksome, it became a
pleasure to go over again the events of the day. I am indebted to this
discipline for a memory of somewhat unusual tenacity, and I recommend
the practice to all who wish to store up facts, or expect to have much
to do with influencing men."[589]
I do not doubt that Mr. Weed's practical command of his past
experiences was much greater after fifty years of this heroic drill
than it would have been without it. Expecting to give his account in
the evening, he attended better to each incident of the day, named and
conceived it differently, set his mind upon it, and in the evening went
over it again. He did _more thinking_ about it, and it stayed with him
in consequence. But I venture to affirm pretty confidently (although
I know how foolish it often is to deny a fact on the strength of a
theory) that the same matter, _casually attended to and not thought
about,_ would have stuck in his memory no better at the end than at
the beginning of his years of heroic self-discipline. He had acquired
a better method of noting and recording his experiences, but his
physiological retentiveness was probably not a bit improved.[590]
_All improvement of memory consists, then, in the improvement of one's
habitual methods of recording facts._ In the traditional terminology
methods are divided into the mechanical, the ingenious, and the
judicious.
The _mechanical methods_ consist in the intensification, prolongation,
and _repetition_ of the impression to be remembered. The modern method
of teaching children to read by blackboard work, in which each word is
impressed by the four-fold channel of eye, ear, voice, and hand, is an
example of an improved mechanical method of memorizing.
_Judicious methods_ of remembering things are nothing but logical ways
of conceiving them and working them into rational systems, classifying
them, analyzing them into parts, etc., etc. All the sciences are such
methods.
Of _ingenious methods_, many have been invented, under the name of
technical memories. By means of these systems it is often possible to
retain entirely disconnected facts, lists of names, numbers, and so
forth, so multitudinous as to be entirely unrememberable in a natural
way. The method consists usually in a framework learned mechanically,
of which the mind is supposed to remain in secure and permanent
possession. Then, whatever is to be remembered is deliberately
associated by some fanciful analogy or connection with some part of
this framework, and this connection thenceforward helps its recall.
The best known and most used of these devices is the figure-alphabet.
To remember numbers, e.g., a figure-alphabet is first formed, in which
each numerical digit is represented by one or more letters. The number
is then translated into such letters as will best make a word, if
possible a word suggestive of the object to which the number belongs.
The word will then be remembered when the numbers alone might be
forgotten.
"The most common figure-alphabet is this:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0.
t, n, m, r, l, sh, g, f, b, s,
d, j, k, v, p, c,
ch, c, z,
g, qu.
"To briefly show its use, suppose it is desired to fix 1142 feet in a
second as the velocity of sound: t, t, r, n, are the letters and order
required. Fill up with vowels forming a phrase, like 'tight run' and
connect it by some such flight of the imagination as that if a man
tried to keep up with the velocity of sound, he would have a tight
run. When you recall this a few days later great care must be taken
not to get confused with the velocity of light, nor to think he had a
_hard_ run which would be 3000 feet too fast."[591]
Dr. Pick and others use a system which consists in linking together any
two ideas to be remembered by means of an intermediate idea which will
be suggested by the first and suggest the second, and so on through the
list. Thus,
"Let us suppose that we are to retain the following series of ideas:
garden, hair, watchman, philosophy, copper, etc.... We can combine the
ideas in this manner: _garden,_ plant, hair of plant--_hair; hair,_
bonnet, _watchman;--watchman,_ wake, study, _philosophy; philosophy,_
chemistry, _copper_; etc. etc." (Pick.)[592]
* * * * *
It is matter of popular knowledge that an impression is remembered the
better in proportion as it is
1) More recent;
2) More attended to; and
3) More often repeated.
The effect of recency is all but absolutely constant. Of two events
of equal significance the remoter one will be the one more likely
to be forgotten. The memories of childhood which persist in old age
can hardly be compared with the events of the day or hour which are
forgotten, for these latter are trivial once-repeated things, whilst
the childish reminiscences have been wrought into us during the
retrospective hours of our entire intervening life. _Other things
equal_, at all times of life recency promotes memory. The only
exception I can think of is the unaccountable memory of certain moments
of our childhood, apparently not fitted by their intrinsic interest to
survive, but which are perhaps the only incidents we can remember out
of the year in which they occurred. Everybody probably has isolated
glimpses of certain hours of his nursery life, the position in which he
stood or sat, the light of the room, what his father or mother said,
etc. These moments so oddly selected for immunity from the tooth of
time probably owe their good fortune to historical peculiarities which
it is now impossible to trace. Very likely we were reminded of them
again soon after they occurred; that became a reason why we should
again recollect them, etc., so that at last they became ingrained.
The _attention_ which we lend to an experience is proportional to its
vivid or interesting character; and it is a notorious fact that what
interests us most vividly at the time is, other things equal, what we
remember best. An impression may be so exciting emotionally as almost
to leave a _scar_ upon the cerebral tissues; and thus originates a
pathological delusion. "A woman attacked by robbers takes all the
men whom she sees, even her own son, for brigands bent on killing
her. Another woman sees her child run over by a horse; no amount of
reasoning, not even the sight of the living child, will persuade her
that he is not killed. A woman called 'thief' in a dispute remains
convinced that every one accuses her of stealing (Esquirol). Another,
attacked with mania at the sight of the fires in her street during the
Commune, still after six months sees in her delirium flames on every
side about her (Luys), etc., etc."[593]
On the general effectiveness of both attention and repetition I cannot
do better than copy what M. Taine has written:
"If we compare different sensations, images, or ideas, we find that
their aptitudes for revival are not equal. A large number of them
are obliterated, and never reappear through life; for instance, I
drove through Paris a day or two ago, and though I saw plainly some
sixty or eighty new faces, I cannot now recall any one of them; some
extraordinary circumstance, a fit of delirium, or the excitement of
haschish would be necessary to give them a chance of revival. On the
other hand, there are sensations with a force of revival which nothing
destroys or decreases. Though, as a rule, time weakens and impairs
our strongest sensations, these reappear entire and intense, without
having lost a particle of their detail, or any degree of their force.
M. Brierre de Boismont, having suffered when a child from a disease
of the scalp, asserts that 'after fifty-five years have elapsed
he can still feel his hair pulled out under the treatment of the
_skull-cap_.'--For my own part, after thirty years, I remember feature
for feature the appearance of the theatre to which I was taken for
the first time. From the third row of boxes, the body of the theatre
appeared to me an immense well, red and flaming, swarming with heads;
below, on the right, on a narrow floor, two men and a woman entered,
went out, and re-entered, made gestures, and seemed to me like lively
dwarfs: to my great surprise, one of these dwarfs fell on his knees,
kissed the lady's hand, then hid behind a screen; the other, who was
coming in, seemed angry, and raised his arm. I was then seven, I could
understand nothing of what was going on; but the well of crimson
velvet was so crowded, gilded, and bright, that after a quarter of an
hour I was, as it were, intoxicated, and fell asleep.
"Every one of us may find similar recollections in his memory, and
may distinguish in them a common character. The primitive impression
has been accompanied _by an extraordinary degree of attention_,
either as being horrible or delightful, or as being new, surprising,
and out of proportion to the ordinary run of our life; this it is we
express by saying that we have been strongly impressed; that we were
absorbed, that we could not think of anything else; that our other
sensations were effaced; that we were pursued all the next day by the
resulting image; that it beset us, that we could not drive it away;
that all distractions were feeble beside it. It is by force of this
disproportion that impressions of childhood are so persistent; the
mind being quite fresh, ordinary objects and events are surprising.
At present, after seeing so many large halls and full theatres, it is
impossible for me, when I enter one, to feel swallowed up, engulfed,
and, as it were, lost in a huge dazzling well. The medical man of
sixty, who has experienced much suffering, both personally and in
imagination, would be less upset now by a surgical operation than when
he was a child.
"Whatever may be the kind of attention, voluntary or involuntary,
it always acts alike; the image of an object or event is capable of
revival, and of complete revival, in proportion to the degree of
attention with which we have considered the object or event. We put
this rule in practice at every moment in ordinary life. If we are
applying ourselves to a book or are in lively conversation, while an
air is being sung in the adjoining room, we do not retain it; we know
vaguely that there is singing going on, and that is all. We then stop
our reading or conversation, we lay aside all internal preoccupations
and external sensations which our mind or the outer world can throw
in our way; we close our eyes, we cause a silence within and about
us, and, if the air is repeated, we listen. We say then that we have
listened with all our ears, that we have applied our whole minds. If
the air is a fine one, and has touched us deeply, we add that we have
been transported, uplifted, ravished, that we have forgotten the world
and ourselves; that for some minutes our soul was dead to all but
sounds....
"This exclusive momentary ascendency of one of our states of mind
explains the greater durability of its aptitude for revival and for
more complete revival. As the sensation revives in the image, the
image reappears with a force proportioned to that of the sensation.
What we meet with in the first state is also to be met with in the
second, since the second is but a revival of the first. So, in the
struggle for life, in which all our images are constantly engaged, the
one furnished at the outset with most force retains in each conflict,
by the very law of repetition which gives it being, the capacity of
treading down its adversaries; this is why it revives, incessantly
at first, then frequently, until at last the laws of progressive
decay, and the continual accession of new impressions take away its
preponderance, and its competitors, finding a clear field, are able to
develop in their turn.
"A second cause of prolonged revivals is repetition itself. Every one
knows that to learn a thing we must not only consider it attentively,
but consider it repeatedly. We say as to this in ordinary language,
that an impression many times renewed is imprinted more deeply and
exactly on the memory. This is how we contrive to retain a language,
airs of music, passages of verse or prose, the technical terms and
propositions of a science, and still more so the ordinary facts by
which our conduct is regulated. When, from the form and color of a
currant-jelly, we think of its taste, or, when tasting it with our
eyes shut, we imagine its red tint and the brilliancy of a quivering
slice, the images in our mind are brightened by repetition. Whenever
we eat, or drink, or walk, or avail ourselves of any of our senses,
or commence or continue any action whatever, the same thing happens.
Every man and every animal thus possesses at every moment of life a
certain stock of clear and easily reviving images, which had their
source in the past in a confluence of numerous experiences, and are
now fed by a flow of renewed experiences. When I want to go from the
Tuileries to the Panthéon, or from my study to the dining-room, I
foresee at every turn the colored forms which will present themselves
to my sight; it is otherwise in the case of a house where I have spent
two hours, or of a town where I have stayed three days; after ten
years have elapsed the images will be vague, full of blanks, sometimes
they will not exist, and I shall have to seek my way or shall lose
myself.--This new property of images is also derived from the first.
As every sensation tends to revive in its image, the sensation twice
repeated will leave after it a double tendency, that is, provided
the attention be as great the second time as the first; usually
this is not the case, for, the novelty diminishing, the interest
diminishes; but if other circumstances renew the interest, or if the
will renovates the attention, the incessantly increasing tendency will
incessantly increase the chances of the resurrection and integrity of
the image."[594]
If a phenomenon is met with, however, too often, and with too great
a variety of contexts, although its image is retained and reproduced
with correspondingly great facility, it fails to come up with any one
particular setting, and the projection of it backwards to a particular
past date consequently does not come about. We _recognize_ but do not
_remember_ it--its associates form too confused a cloud. No one is said
to remember, says Mr. Spencer,
"that the object at which he looks has an opposite side; or that
a certain modification of the visual impression implies a certain
distance; or that the thing he sees moving about is a live animal. To
ask a man whether he remembers that the sun shines, that fire burns,
that iron is hard, would be a misuse of language. Even the almost
fortuitous connections among our experiences cease to be classed as
memories when they have become thoroughly familiar. Though, on hearing
the voice cf some unseen person slightly known to us, we say we
recollect to whom the voice belongs, we do not use the same expression
respecting the voices of those with whom we live. The meanings of
words which in childhood have to be consciously recalled seem in adult
life to be immediately present."[595]
These are cases where too many paths, leading to too diverse
associates, block each other's way, and all that the mind gets along
with its object is a fringe of felt familiarity or sense that there
_are_ associates. A similar result comes about when a definite
setting is only nascently aroused. We then feel that we have seen the
object already, but when or where we cannot say, though we may seem
to ourselves to be on the brink of saying it. That nascent cerebral
excitations can effect consciousness with a sort of sense of the
imminence of that which stronger excitations would make us definitely
feel, is obvious from what happens when we seek to remember a name.
It tingles, it trembles on the verge, but does not come. Just such a
tingling and trembling of unrecovered associates is the penumbra of
recognition that may surround any experience and make it seem familiar,
though we know not why.[596]
There is a curious experience which everyone seems to have had--the
feeling that the present moment in its completeness has been
experienced before--we were saying just this thing, in just this
place, to just these people, etc. This 'sense of pre-existence' has
been treated as a great mystery and occasioned much speculation. Dr.
Wigan considered it due to a dissociation of the action of the two
hemispheres, one of them becoming conscious a little later than the
other, but both of the same fact.[597] I must confess that the quality
of mystery seems to me a little strained. I have over and over again
in my own case succeeded in resolving the phenomenon into a case of
memory, so indistinct that whilst some past circumstances are presented
again, the others are not. The dissimilar portions of the past do not
arise completely enough at first for the date to be identified, All we
get is the present scene with a general suggestion of pastness about
it. That faithful observer, Prof. Lazarus, interprets the phenomenon in
the same way;[598] and it is noteworthy that just as soon as the past
context grows complete and distinct the emotion of weirdness fades from
the experience.
EXACT MEASUREMENTS OF MEMORY
have recently been made in Germany. Professor Ebbinghaus, in a really
heroic series of daily observations of more than two years' duration,
examined the powers of retention and reproduction. He learned lists of
meaningless syllables by heart, and tested his recollection of them
from day to day. He could not remember more than 7 after a single
reading. It took, however, 16 readings to remember 12, 44 readings to
remember 24, and 55 readings to remember 26 syllables, the moment of
'remembering' being here reckoned as the first moment when the list
could be recited without a fault.[599] When a 16-syllable list was read
over a certain number of times on one day, and then studied on the day
following until remembered, it was found that the number of seconds
saved in the study on the second day was proportional to the number of
readings on the first--proportional, that is, within certain rather
narrow limits, for which see the text.[600] No amount of repetition
spent on nonsense-verses over a certain length enabled Dr. Ebbinghaus
to retain them without error for 24 hours. In forgetting such things
as these lists of syllables, the loss goos on very much more rapidly
at first than later on. He measured the loss by the number of seconds
required to _relearn_ the list after it had been once learned. Roughly
speaking, if it took a thousand seconds to learn the list, and five
hundred to relearn it, the loss between the two learnings would have
been one half. Measured in this way, full half of the forgetting
seems to occur within the first half-hour, whilst only four fifths is
forgotten at the end of a month. The nature of this result might have
been anticipated, but hardly its numerical proportions. Dr. Ebbinghaus
says:
"The initial rapidity, as well as the final slowness, as these were
ascertained under certain experimental conditions and for a particular
individual,... may well surprise us. An hour after the work of
learning had ceased, forgetting was so far advanced that more than
half of the original work had to be applied again before the series
of syllables could once more be reproduced. Eight hours later two
thirds of the original labor had to be applied. Gradually, however,
the process of oblivion grew slower, so that even for considerable
stretches of time the losses were but barely ascertainable. After 24
hours a third, after 6 days a fourth, and after a whole month a good
fifth of the original labor remain in the shape of its after-effects,
and made the relearning by so much the more speedy."[601]
But the most interesting result of all those reached by this author
relates to the question whether ideas are recalled only by those
that previously came immediately before them, or whether an idea can
possibly recall another idea with which it was never in _immediate_
contact, without passing through the intermediate mental links. The
question is of theoretic importance with regard to the way in which
the process of 'association of ideas' must be conceived; and Dr.
Ebbinghaus's attempt is as successful as it is original, in bringing
two views, which seem at first sight inaccessible to proof, to a direct
practical test, and giving the victory to one of them. His experiments
conclusively show that an idea is not only 'associated' directly with
the one that follows it, and with the rest _through that_, but that it
is _directly_ associated with _all_ that are near it, though in unequal
degrees. He first measured the time needed to impress on the memory
certain lists of syllables, and then the time needed to impress lists
of the same syllables with gaps between them. Thus, representing the
syllables by numbers, if the first list were 1, 2, 3, 4,... 13, 14, 15,
16, the second would be 1, 3, 5,... 15, 2, 4, 6,... 16, and so forth,
with many variations.
Now, if 1 and 3 in the first list were learned in that order merely
by 1 calling up 2, and by 2 calling up 3, leaving out the 2 ought
to leave 1 and 3 with no tie in the mind; and the second list ought
to take as much time in the learning as if the first list had never
been heard of. If, on the other hand, 1 has a _direct_ influence on
3 as well as on 2, that influence should be exerted even when 2 is
dropped out; and a person familiar with the first list ought to learn
the second one more rapidly than otherwise he could. This latter case
is what actually occurs; and Dr. Ebbinghaus has found that syllables
originally separated by as many as seven intermediaries still reveal,
by the increased rapidity with which they are learned in order, the
strength of the tie that the original learning established between
them, over the heads, so to speak, of all the rest. These last results
ought to make us careful, when we speak of nervous 'paths,' to use the
word in no restricted sense. They add one more fact to the set of facts
which prove that association is subtler than consciousness, and that a
nerve-process may, without producing consciousness, be effective in the
same way in which consciousness would have seemed to be effective if it
had been there.[602] Evidently the path from 1 to 3 (omitting 2 from
consciousness) is facilitated, broadened perhaps, by the old path from
1 to 3 through 2--only the component which shoots round through this
latter way is too feeble to let 2 be thought as a distinct object.
* * * * *
Mr. Wolfe, in his experiments on recognition, used vibrating metal
tongues.
"These tongues gave tones differing by 2 vibrations only in the two
lower octaves, and by 4 vibrations in the three higher octaves. In the
first series of experiments a tone was selected, and, after sounding
it for one second, a second tone was sounded, which was either the
same as the first, or different from it by 4, 8, or 12 vibrations in
different series. The person experimented upon was to answer whether
the second tone was the same as the first, thus showing that he
recognized it, or whether it was different, and, if so, whether it
was higher or lower. Of course, the interval of time between the two
tones was an important factor. The proportionate number of correct
judgments, and the smallness of the difference of the vibration-rates
of the two tones, would measure the accuracy of the tone-memory. It
appeared that one could tell more readily when the two tones were
alike than when they were different, although in both cases the
accuracy of the memory was remarkably good.... The main point is the
effect of the time-interval between the tone and its reproduction.
This was varied from 1 second to 30 seconds, or even to 60 seconds
or 120 seconds in some experiments. The general result is, that the
longer the interval, the smaller are the chances that the tone will be
recognized; and this process of forgetting takes place at first very
rapidly, and then more slowly.... This law is subject to considerable
variations, one of which seems to be constant and is peculiar; namely,
there seems to be a rhythm in the memory itself, which, after falling,
recovers slightly, and then fades out again."[603]
This periodical renewal of acoustic memory would seem to be an
important element in the production of the agreeableness of certain
rates of recurrence in sound.
FORGETTING.
In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important a
function as recollecting.
Locke says, in a memorable page of his dear old book:
"The memory of some men, it is true, is very tenacious, even to
a miracle; but yet there seems to be a constant decay of all our
ideas, even of those which are struck deepest, and in minds the
most retentive: so that if they be not sometimes renewed by repeated
exercise of the senses, or reflection on those kinds of objects which
at first occasioned them, the print wears out, and at last there
remains nothing to be seen. Thus the ideas, as well as children, of
our youth, often die before us; and our minds represent to us those
tombs to which we are fast approaching; where, though the brass and
marble remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by time, and the
imagery moulders away. The pictures drawn in our minds are laid in
fading colors; and, if not sometimes refreshed, vanish and disappear.
How much the constitution of our bodies, and the make of our animal
spirits, are concerned in this; and whether the temper of the brain
makes this difference, that in some it retains the characters drawn on
it like marble, in others like freestone, and in others little better
than sand, I shall not here inquire, though it may seem probable that
the constitution of the body does sometimes influence the memory;
since we oftentimes find a disease quite strip the mind of all its
ideas, and the flames of a fever in a few days calcine all those
images to dust and confusion, which seemed to be as lasting as if
graven in marble."[604]
This peculiar mixture of forgetting with our remembering is but one
instance of our mind's selective activity. Selection is the very keel
on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its
utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most
occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take
as long for us to recall a space of time as it took the original
time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking.
All recollected times undergo, accordingly, what M. Ribot calls
foreshortening; and this foreshortening is due to the omission of an
enormous number of the facts which filled them.
"As fast as the present enters into the past, our states of
consciousness disappear and are obliterated. Passed in review at a
few days' distance, nothing or little of them remains: most of them
have made shipwreck in that great nonentity from which they never
more will emerge, and they have carried with them the quantity of
duration which was inherent in their being. This deficit of surviving
conscious states is thus a deficit in the amount of represented
time. The process of abridgment, of foreshortening, of which we have
spoken, presupposes this deficit. If, in order to reach a distant
reminiscence, we had to go through the entire series of terms which
separate it from our present selves, memory would become impossible
on account of the length of the operation. We thus reach the
paradoxical result that one condition of remembering is that we should
forget. Without totally forgetting a prodigious number of states of
consciousness, and momentarily forgetting a large number, we could not
remember at all. Oblivion, except in certain cases, is thus no malady
of memory, but a condition of its health and its life."[605]
There are many irregularities in the process of forgetting which are as
yet unaccounted for. A thing forgotten on one day will be remembered on
the next. Something we have made the most strenuous efforts to recall,
but all in vain, will, soon after we have given up the attempt, saunter
into the mind, as Emerson somewhere says, as innocently as if it had
never been sent for. Experiences of bygone date will revive after years
of absolute oblivion, often as the result of some cerebral disease or
accident which seems to develop latent paths of association, as the
photographer's fluid develops the picture sleeping in the collodion
film. The oftenest quoted of these cases is Coleridge's:
"In a Roman Catholic town in Germany, a young woman, who could neither
read nor write, was seized with a fever, and was said by the priests
to be possessed of a devil, because she was heard talking Latin,
Greek, and Hebrew. Whole sheets of her ravings were written out, and
found to consist of sentences intelligible in themselves, but having
slight connection with each other. Of her Hebrew sayings, only a few
could be traced to the Bible, and most seemed to be in the Rabbinical
dialect. All trick was out of the question; the woman was a simple
creature; there was no doubt as to the fever. It was long before any
explanation, save that of demoniacal possession, could be obtained.
At last the mystery was unveiled by a physician, who determined to
trace back the girl's history, and who, after much trouble, discovered
that at the age of nine she had been charitably taken by an old
Protestant pastor, a great Hebrew scholar, in whose house she lived
till his death. On further inquiry it appeared to have been the old
man's custom for years to walk up and down a passage of his house into
which the kitchen opened, and to read to himself with a loud voice
out of his books. The books were ransacked, and among them were found
several of the Greek and Latin Fathers, together with a collection of
Rabbinical writings. In these works so many of the passages taken down
at the young woman's bedside were identified that there could be no
reasonable doubt as to their source."[606]
Hypnotic subjects as a rule forget all that has happened in their
trance. But in a succeeding trance they will often remember the events
of a past one. This is like what happens in those cases of 'double
personality' in which no recollection of one of the lives is to be
found in the other. We have already seen in an earlier chapter that the
sensibility often differs from one of the alternate personalities to
another, and we have heard M. Pierre Janet's theory that anæsthesias
carry amnesias with them (see above, pp. 385 ff.). In certain cases
this is evidently so; the throwing of certain functional brain-tracts
out of gear with others, so as to dissociate their consciousness from
that of the remaining brain, throws them out for both sensorial and
ideational service. M. Janet proved in various ways that what his
patients forgot when anæsthetic they remembered when the sensibility
returned. For instance, he restored their tactile sense temporarily
by means of electric currents, passes, etc., and then made them
handle various objects, such as keys and pencils, or make particular
movements, like the sign of the cross. The moment the anæsthesia
returned they found it impossible to recollect the objects or the acts.
'They had had nothing in their hands, they had done nothing,' etc.
The next day, however, sensibility being again restored by similar
processes, they remembered perfectly the circumstance, and told what
they had handled or had done.
All these pathological facts are showing us that the sphere of possible
recollection may be wider than we think, and that in certain matters
apparent oblivion is no proof against possible recall under other
conditions. They give no countenance, however, to the extravagant
opinion that nothing we experience can be absolutely forgotten. In
real life, in spite of occasional surprises, most of what happens
actually is forgotten. The only reasons for supposing that if
the conditions were forthcoming everything would revive are of a
transcendental sort. Sir Wm. Hamilton quotes and adopts them from the
German writer Schmid. Knowledge being a 'spontaneous self-energy' on
the part of the mind,
"this energy being once determined, it is natural that it should
persist, until again annihilated by other causes. This [annihilation]
would be the case, were the mind merely passive.... But the mental
activity, the act of knowledge, of which I now speak, is more than
this; it is an energy of the self-active power of a subject one and
indivisible: consequently a part of the ego must be detached or
annihilated, if a cognition once existent be again extinguished. Hence
it is that the problem most difficult of solution is not, how a mental
activity endures, but how it ever vanishes."[607]
Those whom such an argument persuades may be left happy with their
belief. Other positive argument there is none, none certainly of a
physiological sort.[608]
* * * * *
When memory begins to decay, proper names are what go first, and at
all times proper names are harder to recollect than those of general
properties and classes of things.
This seems due to the fact that common qualities and names have
contracted an infinitely greater number of associations in our mind
than the names of most of the persons whom we know. Their memory is
better organized. Proper names as well organized as those of our family
and friends are recollected as well as those of any other objects.[609]
'Organization' means numerous associations; and the more numerous the
associations, the greater the number of paths of recall. For the same
reason adjectives, conjunctions, prepositions, and the cardinal verbs,
those words, in short, which form the grammatical framework of all our
speech, are the very last to decay. Kussmaul[610] makes the following
acute remark on this subject:
"The concreter a conception is, the sooner is its name forgotten. This
is because our ideas of persons and things are less strongly bound
up with their names than with such abstractions as their business,
their circumstances, their qualities. We easily can imagine persons
and things without their names, the sensorial image of them being
more important than that other symbolic image, their name. Abstract
conceptions, on the other hand, are only acquired by means of the
words which alone serve to confer stability upon them. This is why
verbs, adjectives, pronouns, and still more adverbs, prepositions, and
conjunctions are more intimately connected with our thinking than are
substantives."
The disease called Aphasia, of which a little was said in Chapter
II, has let in a flood of light on the phenomenon of Memory, by
showing the number of ways in which the use of a given object, like a
word, may be lost by the mind. We may lose our acoustic idea or our
articulatory idea of it; neither without the other will give us proper
command of the word. And if we have both, but have lost the paths of
association between the brain-centres which support the two, we are
in as bad a plight. 'Ataxic' and 'amnesic' aphasia, 'word-deafness,'
and 'associative aphasia' are all practical losses of word-memory. We
have thus, as M. Ribot says, not memory so much as memories.[611] The
visual, the tactile, the muscular, the auditory memory may all vary
independently of each other in the same individual; and different
individuals may have them developed in different degrees. As a rule,
a man's memory is good in the departments in which his interest
is strong; but those departments are apt to be those in which his
discriminative sensibility is high. A man with a bad ear is not likely
to have practically a good musical memory, or a purblind person to
remember visual appearances well. In a later chapter we shall see
illustrations of the differences in men's imagining power.[612] It
is obvious that the machinery of memory must be largely determined
thereby.
Mr. Galton, in his work on English Men of Science,[613] has given a
very interesting collation of cases showing individual variations in
the type of memory, where it is strong. Some have it verbal. Others
have it good for facts and figures, others for form. Most say that
what is to be remembered must first be rationally conceived and
assimilated.[614]
* * * * *
There is an interesting fact connected with remembering, which, so
far as I know, Mr. R. Verdon was the first writer expressly to call
attention to. We can _set_ our memory as it were to retain things for a
certain time, and then let them depart.
"Individuals often remember clearly and well up to the time when
they have to use their knowledge, and then, when it is no longer
required, there follows a rapid and extensive decay of the traces.
Many schoolboys forget their lessons after they have said them, many
barristers forget details got up for a particular case. Thus a boy
learns thirty lines of Homer, says them perfectly, and then forgets
them so that he could not say five consecutive lines the next morning,
and a barrister may be one week learned in the mysteries of making
cog-wheels, but in the next he may be well acquainted with the anatomy
of the ribs instead."[615]
The rationale of this fact is obscure; and the existence of it ought to
make us feel how truly subtle are the nervous processes which memory
involves. Mr. Verdon adds that
"When the use of a record is withdrawn, and attention withdrawn from
it, and we think no more about it, we know that we experience a
feeling of relief, and we may thus conclude that energy is in some
way liberated. If the ... attention is not withdrawn, so that we keep
the record in mind, we know that this feeling of relief does not take
place.... Also we are well aware, not only that after this feeling
of relief takes place, the record does not seem so well conserved as
before, but that we have real difficulty in attempting to remember it."
This shows that we are not as entirely unconscious of a topic as we
think, during the time in which we seem to be merely retaining it
subject to recall.
"Practically," says Mr. Verdon, "we sometimes keep a matter in hand
not exactly by attending to it, but by keeping our attention referred
to something connected with it from time to time. Translating this
into the language of physiology, we mean that by referring attention
to a part within, or closely connected with, the system of traces
[paths] required to be remembered, we keep it well fed, so that the
traces are preserved with the utmost delicacy."
This is perhaps as near as we can get to an explanation. Setting the
mind to remember a thing involves a continual minimal irradiation
of excitement into paths which lead thereto, involves the continued
presence of the thing in the 'fringe' of our consciousness. Letting the
thing go involves withdrawal of the irradiation, unconsciousness of the
thing, and, after a time, obliteration of the paths.
[Illustration: FIG. 46.]
A curious peculiarity of our memory is that things are impressed better
by active than by passive repetition. I mean that in learning by heart
(for example), when we almost know the piece, it pays better to wait
and recollect by an effort from within, than to look at the book again.
If we recover the words in the former way, we shall probably know them
the next time; if in the latter way, we shall very likely need the book
once more. The learning by heart means the formation of paths from a
former set to a later set of cerebral word-processes: call 1 and 2 in
the diagram the processes in question; then when we remember by inward
effort, the path is formed by discharge from 1 to 2, just as it will
afterwards be used. But when we excite 2 by the eye, although the path
1--2 doubtless is then shot through also, the phenomenon which we are
discussing shows that the direct discharge from 1 into 2, unaided by
the eyes, ploughs the deeper and more permanent groove. There is,
moreover, a greater amount of tension accumulated in the brain before
the discharge from 1 to 2, when the latter takes place unaided by the
eye. This is proved by the general feeling of strain in the effort to
remember 2; and this also ought to make the discharge more violent
and the path more deep. A similar reason doubtless accounts for the
familiar fact that we remember our own theories, our own discoveries,
combinations, inventions, in short whatever 'ideas' originate in our
own brain, a thousand times better than exactly similar things which
are communicated to us from without.
A word, in closing, about the metaphysics involved in remembering.
According to the assumptions of this book, thoughts accompany the
brain's workings, and those thoughts are cognitive of realities.
The whole relation is one which we can only write down empirically,
confessing that no glimmer of explanation of it is yet in sight. That
brains should give rise to a knowing consciousness at all, this is the
one mystery which returns, no matter of what sort the consciousness
and of what sort the knowledge may be. Sensations, aware of mere
qualities, involve the mystery as much as thoughts, aware of complex
systems, involve it. To the platonizing tradition in philosophy,
however, this is not so. Sensational consciousness is something
_quasi-material_, hardly cognitive, which one need not much wonder
at. _Relating_ consciousness is quite the reverse, and the mystery
of it is unspeakable. Professor Ladd, for example, in his usually
excellent book,[616] after well showing the matter-of-fact dependence
of retention and reproduction on brain-paths, says:
"In the study of perception psycho-physics _can_ do much towards a
scientific explanation. It can tell what qualities of stimuli produce
certain qualities of sensations, it can suggest a principle relating
the quantity of the stimuli to the intensity of the sensation; it
can investigate the laws under which, by combined action of various
excitations, the _sensations are combined_ [?] into presentations
of sense; it can show how the time-relations of the sensations and
percepts in consciousness correspond to the objective relations in
time of the stimulations. But for that spiritual activity which
actually _puts together_ in consciousness the sensations, it cannot
even suggest the beginning of a physical explanation. Moreover, no
cerebral process can be conceived of, which--in case it were known
to exist--could possibly be regarded as a fitting basis for this
unifying _actus_ of mind. Thus also, and even more emphatically, must
we insist upon the complete inability of physiology to suggest an
explanation for conscious memory, in so far as it is _memory_--that
is, in so far as it most imperatively calls for explanation.... The
very essence of the act of memory consists in the ability to say:
This after-image is the image of a percept I had a moment since;
or this image of memory is the image of the percept I had at a
certain time--I do not remember precisely how long since. It would,
then, be quite contrary to the facts to hold that, when an image of
memory appears in consciousness, it is recognized as belonging to a
particular original percept on account of its perceived resemblance
to this percept. The original percept does not exist and will never
be _reproduced_. Even more palpably false and absurd would it be to
hold that any similarity of the impressions or processes in end organs
or central organs explains the act of conscious memory. Consciousness
knows nothing of such similarity; knows nothing even of the existence
of nervous impressions and processes. Moreover, we could never _know_
two impressions or processes that are separated in time to be similar,
without involving the same inexplicable act of memory. It is a fact
of consciousness on which all possibility of connected experience and
of recorded and cumulative human knowledge is dependent that certain
phases or products of consciousness appear with a claim to stand for
(to represent)[617] past experiences to which they are regarded as in
some respect similar. It is this peculiar claim in consciousness which
constitutes the essence of an act of memory; it is this which makes
the memory wholly inexplicable as a mere persistence or recurrence
of similar impressions. It is this which makes conscious memory a
spiritual phenomenon, the explanation of which, as arising out of
nervous processes and conditions, is not simply undiscovered in fact,
but utterly incapable of approach by the imagination. When, then, we
speak of a physical basis of memory, recognition must be made of the
complete inability of science to suggest any physical process which
can be conceived of as correlated with that peculiar and mysterious
_actus_ of the mind, _connecting_ its present and its past, which
constitutes the essence of memory."
This passage seems to me characteristic of the reigning half-way
modes of thought. It puts the difficulties in the wrong places. At
one moment it seems to admit with the cruder sensationalists that the
material of our thoughts is independent sensations reproduced, and
that the 'putting together' of these sensations would be knowledge, if
it could only be brought about, the only mystery being as to the what
'_actus_' can bring it about. At another moment it seems to contend
that even this sort of 'combining' would not be knowledge, because
certain of the elements connected must 'claim to represent or stand
for' past originals, which is incompatible with their being mere images
revived. The result is various confused and scattered mysteries and
unsatisfied intellectual desires. But why not 'pool' our mysteries
into one great mystery, the mystery that brain-processes occasion
knowledge at all? It is surely no different mystery to _feel_ myself by
means of one brain-process writing at this table now, and by means of
a different brain-process a year hence to _remember_ myself writing.
All that psychology can do is to seek to determine _what_ the several
brain-processes are; and this, in a wretchedly imperfect way, is what
such writings as the present chapter have begun to do. But of 'images
reproduced,' and 'claiming to represent,' and 'put together by a
unifying _actus_,' I have been silent, because such expressions either
signify nothing, or they are only roundabout ways of simply saying that
the _past is known_ when certain brain-conditions are fulfilled, and it
seems to me that the straightest and shortest way of saying that is the
best.
For a history of opinion about Memory, and other bibliographic
references, I must refer to the admirable little monograph on the
subject by Mr. W. H. Burnham in the American Journal of Psychology,
vols. i and ii. Useful books are: D. Kay's Memory, What It Is, and How
to Improve It (1888); and F. Fauth's Das Gedächtniss, Studie zu einer
Pädagogik, etc., 1888.
END OF VOL. I.
FOOTNOTES:
[567] L'Homme et l'Intelligence, p. 32.
[568] Professor Richet has therefore no right to say, as he does in
another place (Revue Philosophique, xxi, 570): "_Without memory no
conscious sensation, without memory no consciousness._" All he is
entitled to say is: "Without memory no consciousness known outside
of itself." Of the sort of consciousness that is an object for later
states, and becomes as it were permanent, he gives a good example:
"Who of us, alas! has not experienced a bitter and profound grief, the
immense laceration cause by the death of some cherished fellow-being?
Well, in these great griefs the present endures neither for a minute,
for an hour, nor for a day, but for weeks and months. The memory of the
cruel moment will not efface itself from consciousness. It disappears
not, but remains living, present, coexisting with the multitude of
other sensations which are juxtaposed in consciousness alongside of
this one persistent emotion which is felt always in the present tense.
A long time is needed ere we can attain to forgetting it, ere we can
make it enter into the past. _Hæret lateri letalis arundo._" (_Ibid._
583.)
[569] This is the primary positive after-image. According to Helmholtz,
one third of a second is the most favorable length of exposure to the
light for producing it. Longer exposure, complicated by subsequent
admission of light to the eye, results in the ordinary negative and
complementary after-images, with their changes, which may (if the
original impression was brilliant and the fixation long) last for many
minutes. Fechner gives the name of memory-after-images (Psychophysik,
ii, 492) to the instantaneous positive effects, and distinguishes
them from ordinary after images by the following characters: 1) Their
originals must have been _attended to_, only such parts of a compound
original as have been attended to appearing. This is not the case in
common visual after-images. 2) The strain of attention towards them
is inward, as in ordinary remembering, not outward, as in observing a
common after-image. 3) A short fixation of the original is better for
the memory-after-image, a long one for the ordinary after-image. 4) The
colors of the memory-after-image are never complementary of those of
the original.
[570] Hermann's Hdbch. ii, 2. 282.
[571] Rev. Philos., 562.
[572] Richet says: "The present has a certain duration, a variable
duration, sometimes a rather long one, which comprehends all the time
occupied by the after-reverberation [_retentissement_, after-image] of
a sensation. For example, if the reverberation of an electric shock
within our nerves lasts ten minutes, for that electric shock there is
a present of ten minutes. On the other hand, a feebler sensation will
have a shorter present. But in every case, for a conscious sensation
[I should say for a _remembered_ sensation] to occur, there must be a
present of a certain duration, of a few seconds at least." We have seen
in the last chapter that it is hard to trace the backward limits of
this immediately intuited duration, or specious present. The figures
which M. Richet supposes appear to be considerably too large.
[573] Cf. Fechner, Psychophysik, ii, 499.
[574] The primary after-image itself cannot be utilized if the stimulus
is too brief. Mr. Cattell found (Psychologische Studien, iii, p. 93
ff.) that the color of a light must fall upon the eye for a period
varying from 0.00275 to 0.006 of a second, in order to be recognized
for what it is. Letters of the alphabet and familiar words require
from 0.00075 to 0.00175 sec.--truly an interval extremely short. Some
letters, E for example, are harder than others. In 1871 Helmholtz and
Baxt had ascertained that when an impression was immediately followed
by another, the latter quenched the former and prevented it from being
known to later consciousness. The first stimulus was letters of the
alphabet, the second a bright white disk. "With an interval of 0.0048
sec. between the two excitations [I copy here the abstract in Ladd's
Physiological Psychology, p. 480], the disk appeared as scarcely a
trace of a weak shimmer; with an interval of 0.0096 sec., letters
appeared in the shimmer--one or two which could be partially recognized
when the interval increased to 0.0144 sec. When the interval was made
0.0192 sec. the objects were a little more clearly discerned; at
0.00336 sec. four letters could be well recognized; at 0.0432 sec.,
five letters; and at 0.0528 sec. all the letters could be read."
(Pflüger's Archiv, iv, 325 ff.)
[575] When the past is recalled symbolically, or conceptually only,
it is true that no such copy need be there. In no sort of conceptual
knowledge is it requisite that definitely resembling images be there
(cf. pp. 471 ff.). But as all conceptual knowledge stands for intuitive
knowledge, and terminates therein, I abstract from this complication,
and confine myself to those memories in which the past is directly
imaged in the mind, or, as we say, intuitively known.
[576] E.g. Spencer, Psychology, i, p. 448. How do the believers in
the sufficiency of the 'image' formulate the cases where we remember
that something did _not_ happen—-that we did not wind our watch, did
not lock the door, etc.? It is very hard to account for these memories
of omission. The image of winding the watch is just as present to my
mind now when I remember that I did not wind it as if I remembered
that I did. It must be a difference in the mode of feeling the image
which leads me to such different conclusions in the two cases. When
I remember that I did wind it, I feel it grown together with its
associates of past date and place. When I remember that I did not, it
keeps aloof; the associates fuse with each other, but not with it.
This sense of fusion, of the belonging together of things, is a most
subtle relation; the sense of non-fusion is an equally subtle one. Both
relations demand most complex mental processes to know them, processes
quite different from that mere presence or absence of an image which
does such service in the cruder books.
[577] Psychologia Empirica, § 174.
[578] Analysis, i, 330-1. Mill believed that the various things
remembered, the self included, enter consciousness in the form of
separate ideas, but so rapidly that they are 'all clustered into one.'
"Ideas called up in close conjunction ... assume, even when there is
the greatest complexity, the appearance, not of many ideas, but of one"
(vol. i, p. 123). This mythology does not impair the accuracy of his
description of memory's _object_.
[579] Compare, however, p. 251, Chapter IX.
[580] Professor Bain adds, in a note to this passage of Mill's: "This
process seems best expressed by laying down a law of Compound or
Composite Association, under which a plurality of feeble links of
connection may be a substitute for one powerful and self-sufficing
link."
[581] Analysis, chap. x.
[582] H. Maudsley, The Physiology of Mind (London, 1876), p. 513.
[583] The only fact which might plausibly be alleged against this view
is the familiar one that we may feel the lapse of time in an experience
so monotonous that its earlier portions can have no 'associates'
different from its later ones. Sit with closed eyes, for example,
and steadily pronounce some vowel-sound, thus, _a-—a—-a-—a-—a—-_ ...
thinking only of the sound. Nothing changes during the time occupied by
the experiment, and yet at the end of it you know that its beginning
was far away. I think, however, that a close attention to what happens
during this experiment shows that it does not violate in the least the
conditions of recall laid down in the text; and that if the moment
to which we mentally hark back lie many seconds behind the present
instant, it always has different associates by which we define its
date. Thus it was when I had just breathed out, or in; or it was the
'first moment' of the performance, the one 'preceded by silence;' or
it was 'one very close to that;' or it was 'one when we were looking
forward instead of back, as now;' or it is simply represented by a
number and conceived symbolically with no definite image of its date.
It seems to me that I have no really intuitive discrimination of the
different past moments after the experience has gone on some little
time, but that back of the 'specious present' they all fuse into a
single conception of the _kind of thing_ that has been going on, with
a more or less clear sense of the total time it has lasted, this
latter being based on an automatic counting of the successive pulses
of thought by which the process is from moment to moment recognized
as being always the same. Within the few seconds which constitute the
specious present there is an intuitive perception of the successive
moments. But these moments, of which we have a primary memory-image,
are not properly _recalled_ from the past, our knowledge of them is in
no way analogous to a memory properly so called. Cf. _supra_, p. 646.
[584] On Intelligence, i, 258-9.
[585] Not that _mere_ native tenacity will make a man great. It must
be coupled with great passions and great intellect besides. Imbeciles
sometimes have extraordinary desultory memory. Drobisch describes
(Empirische Psychol., p. 95) the case of a young man whom he examined.
He had with difficulty been taught to read and speak. "But if two or
three minutes were allowed him to peruse an octavo page, he then could
spell the single words out from his memory as well as if the book lay
open before him.... That there was no deception I could test by means
of a new Latin law-dissertation which had just come into my hands,
which he never could have seen, and of which both subject and language
were unknown to him. He read off [mentally] many lines, skipping about
too, of the page which had been given him to see, no worse than if the
experiment had been made with a child's story." Drobisch describes
this case as if it were one of unusual persistence in the visual image
['primary memory,' _vide supra_, p. 643]. But he adds that the youth
'remembered his pages a long time.' In the Journal of Speculative
Philosophy for Jan. 1871 (vi, 6) is an account by Mr. W. D. Henkle
(together with the stock classic examples of preternatural memory) of
an almost blind Pennsylvania farmer who could remember the day of the
week on which any date had fallen for forty-two years past, and also
the kind of weather it was, and what he was doing on each of more than
fifteen thousand days. Pity that such a magnificent faculty as this
could not have found more worthy application!
What these cases show is that the mere organic retentiveness of a
man need bear no definite relation to his other mental powers. Men
of the highest general powers will often forget nothing, however
insignificant. One of the most generally accomplished men I know has a
memory of this sort. He never keeps written note of anything, yet is
never at a loss for a fact which he has once heard. He remembers the
old addresses of all his New York friends, living in numbered streets,
addresses which they themselves have long since moved away from and
forgotten. He says that he should probably recognize an individual
fly, if he had seen him thirty years previous--he is, by the way, an
entomologist. As an instance of his desultory memory, he was introduced
to a certain colonel at a club. The conversation fell upon the signs of
age in man. The colonel challenged him to estimate his age. He looked
at him, and gave the exact day of his birth, to the wonder of all.
But the secret of this accuracy was that, having picked up some days
previously an army-register, he had idly turned over its list of names,
with dates of birth, graduation, promotions, etc., attached, and when
the colonel's name was mentioned to him at the club, these figures, on
which he had not bestowed a moment's thought, involuntarily surged up
in his mind. Such a memory is of course a priceless boon.
[586] Cf. Ebbinghaus: Ueber das Gedächtniss (1885), pp. 67, 45. One
may hear a person say: "I have a very poor memory, because I was never
systematically made to learn poetry at school."
[587] How to Strengthen the Memory; or, The Natural and Scientific
Methods of Never Forgetting. By M. H. Holbrook, M.D. New York (no date).
[588] Page 39.
[589] Op. cit. p. 100.
[590] In order to test the opinion so confidently expressed in the
text, I have tried to see whether a certain amount of daily training
in learning poetry by heart will shorten the time it takes to learn
an entirely different kind of poetry. During eight successive days I
learned 158 lines of Victor Hugo's 'Satyr.' The total number of minutes
required for this was 131 5/6--it should be said that I had learned
nothing by heart for many years. I then, working for twenty-odd minutes
daily, learned the entire first book of Paradise Lost, occupying 38
days in the process. After this training I went back to Victor Hugo's
poem, and found that 158 additional lines (divided exactly as on the
former occasion) took me 151 1/2 minutes. In other words, I committed
my Victor Hugo to memory before the training at the rate of a line in
50 seconds, after the training at the rate of a line in 57 seconds,
just the opposite result from that which the popular view would lead
one to expect. But as I was perceptibly fagged with other work at the
time of the second batch of Victor Hugo, I thought that might explain
the retardation; so I persuaded several other persons to repeat the
test.
Dr. W. H. Burnham learned 16 lines of In Memoriam for 8 days; time,
14-17 minutes--daily average 14 3/4. He then trained himself on
Schiller's translation of the second book of the Æneid into German, 16
lines daily for 26 consecutive days. On returning to the same quantity
of In Memoriam again, he found his maximum time 20 minutes, minimum
10, average 14 27/48. As he feared the outer conditions might not have
been as favorable this time as the first, he waited a few days and got
conditions as near as possible identical. The result was, minimum time
8 minutes; maximum 19 1/2; average 14 3/48.
Mr. E. S. Drown tested himself on Virgil for 16 days, then again for 16
days, after training himself on Scott. Average time before training,
13 minutes 26 seconds; after training, 12 minutes 16 seconds. [Sixteen
days is too long for the test, it gives time for training on the
test-verse.]
Mr. C. H. Baldwin took 10 lines for 15 days as his test, trained
himself on 450 lines 'of an entirely different verse,' and then took 15
days more of the former verse 10 lines a day. Average result: 3 minutes
41 seconds before, 3 minutes 2 seconds after, training. [Same criticism
as before.]
Mr. E. A. Pease tested himself on Idyls of the King, and trained
himself on Paradise Lost. Average result of 6 days each time: 14
minutes 34 seconds before, 14 minutes 55 seconds after, training. Mr.
Burnham having suggested that to eliminate facilitating effect entirely
from the training verses one ought to test one's self _à la_ Ebbinghaus
on series of nonsense-syllables, having no analogy whatever with any
system of expressive verses, I induced two of my students to perform
that experiment also. The record is unfortunately lost; but the result
was a very considerable shortening of the average time of the second
series of nonsense-syllables, learned after training. This seems to
me, however, more to show the effects of rapid habituation to the
nonsense-verses themselves than those of the poetry used between them.
But I mean to prosecute the experiments farther, and will report in
another place.
One of my students having quoted a clergyman of his acquaintance
who had marvellously improved by practice his power of learning his
sermons by heart, I wrote to the gentleman for corroboration. I append
his reply, which shows that the increased facility is due rather to
a change in his methods of learning than to his native retentiveness
having grown by exercise: "As for memory, mine has improved year by
year, except when in ill-health, like a gymnast's muscle. Before
twenty it took three or four days to commit an hour-long sermon; after
twenty, two days, one day, half a day, and now one slow analytic, very
attentive or adhesive reading does it. But memory seems to me the most
physical of intellectual powers. Bodily ease and freshness have much to
do with it. Then there is a great difference of facility in method. I
used to commit sentence by sentence. Now I take the idea of the whole,
then its leading divisions, then its subdivisions, then its sentences."
[591] E. Pick: Memory and its Doctors (1888), p. 7.
[592] This system is carried out in great detail in a book called
'Memory Training,' by Wm. L. Evans (1889).
[593] Paulhan, L'Activité mental, et les Éléments de l'Esprit (1889).
p. 70.
[594] On Intelligence, i, 77-82.
[595] Psychology, § 201.
[596] Professor Höffding considers that the absence of contiguous
associates distinctly thought-of is a proof that associative processes
are not concerned in these cases of instantaneous recognition where
we get a strong sense of familiarity with the object, but no recall
of previous time or place. His theory of what happens is that the
object before us, A, comes with a sense of familiarity whenever it
awakens _a slumbering image, a, of its own past self,_ whilst without
this image it seems unfamiliar. The _quality of familiarity_ is
due to the coalescence of the two similar processes A + _a_ in the
brain (Psychologie, p. 188; Vierteljsch. f. wiss. Phil., xiii, 432
[1889]). This explanation is a very tempting one where the phenomenon
of recognition is reduced to its simplest terms. Experiments have
been performed in Wundt's laboratory by Messrs. Wolfe, see below, p.
679, and Lehmann (Philosophische Studien, v, 96), in which a person
had to tell out of several closely resembling sensible impressions
(sounds, tints of color) presented, which of them was the same with
one presented a moment before. And it does seem here as if the fading
process in the just-excited tract must combine with the process of
the new impression to give to the latter a peculiar subjective tinge
which should separate it from the impressions which the other objects
give. But recognition of this immediate sort is beyond our power after
a very short time has intervened. A couple of minutes' interval is
generally fatal to it; so that it is impossible to conceive that our
frequent instantaneous recognition of a face, e.g., as having been met
before, takes place by any such simple process. Where we associate
a _head of classification_ with the object, the time-interval has
much less effect. Dr. Lehmann could identify shades of gray much more
successfully and permanently after mentally attaching names or numbers
to them. Here it is the recall of the contiguous associate, the number
or name, which brings about the recognition. Where an experience is
complex, each element of the total object has had the other elements
for its past contiguous associates. Each element thus tends to revive
the other elements from within, at the same time that the outward
object is making them revive from without. We have thus, whenever we
meet a familiar object, that sense of _expectation gratified_ which
is so large a factor in our æsthetic emotions; and even were there
no 'fringe of tendency' toward the arousal of _extrinsic_ associates
(which there certainly always is), still this _intrinsic_ play of
mutual association among the parts would give a character of ease
to familiar percepts which would make of them a distinct subjective
class. A process fills its old bed in a different way from that in
which it makes a new bed. One can appeal to introspection for proof.
When, for example, I go into a slaughter-house into which I once went
years ago, and the horrid din of the screaming hogs strikes me with
the overpowering sense of identification, when the blood-stained face
of the 'sticker,' whom I had long ceased to think of, is immediately
recognized as the face that struck me so before; when the dingy and
reddened woodwork, the purple-flowing floor, the smell, the emotion
of disgust, and _all_ the details, in a word, forthwith re-establish
themeelves as familiar occupants of my mind; the _extraneous_
associates of the past time are anything but prominent. Again, in
trying to think of an engraving, say the portrait of Rajah Brooke
prefixed to his biography, I can do so only partially; but when I
take down the book and, looking at the actual face, am smitten with
the intimate sense of its sameness with the one I was striving to
resuscitate,--where in the experience is the element of _extrinsic_
association? In both these cases it surely _feels_ as if the moment
when the sense of recall is most vivid were also the moment when all
_extraneous_ associates were most suppressed. The butcher's face
recalls the former walls of the shambles; their thought recalls the
groaning beasts, and they the face again, just as I now experience
them, with no different past ingredient. In like manner the peculiar
deepening of my consciousness of the Rajah's physiognomy at the moment
when I open the book and say "Ah! that's the very face!" is so intense
as to banish from my mind all collateral circumstances, whether of the
present or of former experiences. But here it is the nose preparing
tracts for the eye, the eye preparing them for the mouth, the mouth
preparing them for the nose again, all these processes involving paths
of contiguous association, as defended in the text. I cannot agree,
therefore, with Prof. Höffding, in spite of my respect for him as a
psychologist, that the phenomenon of instantaneous recognition is only
explicable through the recall and comparison of the thing with its
own past image. Nor can I see in the facts in question any additional
ground for reinstating the general notion which we have already
rejected (_supra_, p. 592) that a 'sensation' is ever received into the
mind by an 'image' of its own past self. It is received by contiguous
associates; or if they form too faint a fringe, its neural currents run
into a bed which is still 'warm' from just-previous currents, and which
consequently feel different from currents whose bed is cold. I agree,
however, with Höffding that Dr. Lehmann's experiments (many of them)
do not seem to prove the point which he seeks to establish. Lehmann,
indeed, seems himself to believe that we recognize a sensation A by
comparing it with its own past image α (_loc. cit._ p. 114), in which
opinion I altogether fail to concur.
[597] Duality of the Mind, p. 84. The same thesis is defended by the
late Mr. R. H. Proctor, who gives some cases rather hard to reconcile
with my own proposed explanation, in 'Knowledge' for Nov. 8, 1884. See
also Ribot, Maladies de la Mémoire, p. 149 ff.
[598] Zeitschr. f. Völkerpsychologie u. s. w., Bd. v, p. 146.
[599] Ueber das Gedächtniss, experimentelle Untersuchungen (1885), p.
64.
[600] _Ibid._ § 23.
[601] _Op. cit._ p. 103.
[602] All the inferences for which we can give no articulate reasons
exemplify this law. In the chapter on Perception we shall have
innumerable examples of it. A good pathological illustration of it is
given in the curious observations of M. Binet on certain hysterical
subjects, with anæsthetic hands, who saw what was done with their hands
as an independent vision but did not feel it. The hand being hidden
by a screen, the patient was ordered to look at another screen and to
tell of any visual image which might project itself thereon. Numbers
would then come, corresponding to the number of times the insensible
member was raised, touched, etc. Colored lines and figures would come,
corresponding to similar ones traced on the palm; the hand itself, or
its fingers, would come when manipulated; and, finally, objects placed
in it would come; but on the hand itself nothing could ever be felt.
The whole phenomenon shows how an idea which remains itself below
the threshold of a certain conscious self may occasion associative
effects therein. The skin-sensations, unfelt by the patient's primary
consciousness, awaken, nevertheless, their usual visual associates
therein.
[603] I copy from the abstract of Wolfe's paper in 'Science' for Nov.
19, 1886. The original is in Psychologische Studien, iii, 534 ff.
[604] Essay conc. Human Understanding, ii, x, 5.
[605] Th. Ribot, Les Maladies de la Mémoire, p. 46.
[606] Biographia Literaria, ed. 1847, i, 117 (quoted in Carpenter's
Mental Physiology, chapter x, which see for a number of other cases,
all unfortunately deficient, like this one, in the evidence of exact
verification which 'psychical research 'demands). Compare also Th.
Ribot, Diseases of Memory, chap. iv. The knowledge of foreign words,
etc., reported in trance mediums, etc., may perhaps often be explained
by exaltation of memory. An hystero-epileptic girl, whose case I quoted
in Proc. of Am. Soc. for Psychical Research, automatically writes an
'Ingoldsby Legend' in several cantos, which her parents say she 'had
never read.' Of course she must have read or heard it, but perhaps
never _learned_ it. Of some macaronic Latin-English verses about a
sea-serpent which her hand also wrote unconsciously, I have vainly
sought the original (see Proc., etc., p. 553).
[607] Lectures on Metaph., ii, 212.
[608] Cf. on this point J. Delbœuf, Le Sommeil et les Rêves (1885), p.
119 ff.; R. Verdon, Forgetfulness, in Mind, ii, 437.
[609] Cf. A. Maury, Le Sommeil et les Rêves, p. 442.
[610] Störungen der Sprache, quoted by Ribot, Les Maladies de la M., p.
133.
[611] Op. cit. chap. iii.
[612] "Those who have a good memory for figures are in general those
who know best how to handle them, that is, those who are most familiar
with their relations to each other and to things." (A. Maury, Le
Sommeil et les Rêves, p. 443.)
[613] Pp. 107-121.
[614] For other examples see Hamilton's Lectures, ii, 219, and A.
Huber: Das Gedächtniss, p. 36 ff.
[615] Mind, ii, 449.
[616] Physiological Psychology, pt. ii, chap. x, § 23.
[617] Why not say 'know'?—-W. J.