mechanical memory are most active in childhood and youth. The normal
child is hungry for words and facts, and gathers information from every
conceivable quarter. The judgment and the reason develop after the mind
has been stored with the materials upon which these may act. Parents
and teachers who are ignorant of this order of development often force
the reasons for arithmetical processes upon the pupil when these are
difficult and when he could learn the eleven hundred variations of the
Greek verb without difficulty, whilst the study of the classical and
foreign languages is postponed to an age when the acquisition of a
new language becomes a difficult task because the logical memory has
driven the mechanical into the background, and the growth of judgment
and reason makes the pupil crave the intellectual food furnished by
the thought-studies. It is a species of cruelty to force upon children
the consideration of the why’s and the wherefore’s of mathematical
operations, when learning how to go through the motions would be quite
enough of a tax upon their mental strength. Some of the demonstrations
in arithmetic are logically more difficult than many of the proofs in
geometry; hence no pupil should be asked to pass his final examination in
arithmetic before he has mastered the elements of geometry. The proper
sequence of subjects is of immense importance in leading the child
from the lower to the higher forms of intellectual activity. With the
proper study of geometry the logical memory steps to the front, and the
thought-studies should then supplant those which largely appeal to the
mechanical memory.
Nevertheless, it is a distinct loss if the verbal or mechanical memory is
ever allowed to drop into desuetude. On this point the practice, as well
as the testimony, of Dr. W. T. Harris is worthy of the attention of every
person charged with the training of himself or others.
[Sidenote: Harris on the memory.]
“If a person finds himself forgetful of names, it is a health-giving
process to take a certain portion of time in committing to memory
words. If this is done by committing new masterpieces of poetry and
prose, or in committing to memory the words of a new language, there
is profit or gain to the thinking powers, as well as to the memory.
Doubtless the cultivation of verbal memory, building up, as it does,
a certain convolution in the brain, has a tendency to prevent atrophy
in that organ. This contains a hint in the direction of keeping up in
the later part of life the faculties which are usually so active in
youth. The tendency is to neglect childish faculties and allow them to
become torpid. But if this is liable to weaken certain portions of the
brain in such a way as to induce hemorrhage, ending in softening of the
brain, certainly the memory should be cultivated, if only for the health
of the brain, and the memory for mechanical items of detail should be
cultivated on grounds of health as well as on grounds of culture. The
extreme advocates of the rational method of teaching are perhaps wrong in
repudiating entirely all mechanical memory of dates and names or items.
Certainly they are right in opposing the extremes of the old pedagogy,
which obliged the pupils to memorize, page after page, the contents of
a grammar _verbatim et literatim et punctuatim_ (as, for instance, the
graduates of the Boston Latin School tell us was the custom early in
this century). But is there not a middle ground? Is there not a minimum
list of details, of dates and names which must and should be memorized,
both on account of the health of the nervous system and on account of
the intrinsic usefulness of the data themselves? And must not the person
in later life continue to exercise these classes of memory which deal
with details for the sake of physical health? This is a question for the
educational pathologist.”[23]
[Sidenote: Vocabularies.]
A teacher of Hebrew spent one-fourth of his time in drill on Hebrew roots
and their meaning. His students groaned under the drudgery imposed. At
the end of the first six chapters of Genesis, he surprised his class by
the announcement, “Now you know half the words in the Hebrew Bible.”
He had selected words used five hundred times, then words used three
hundred times, and drilled on these in various ways until he had fixed
all the words in most frequent use in the Hebrew text. It was a great
saving of time in the end, and a great step towards reading at sight the
Old Testament in the original. By the modern short-cuts to knowledge
the pupils are hurried from one classic author to another, and hence
they never master the vocabulary to the extent of reading Latin or Greek
at sight. A little less haste at the start, and a little more drill
for the purpose of fixing new words as they come up, thus avoiding the
everlasting turning to the lexicon for more than half the words in a
lesson, would facilitate progress and enable the student to find some
pleasure in the study of foreign languages.
[Sidenote: Teaching languages.]
An old teacher of Latin, who had discovered this secret in the
acquisition of a foreign tongue, agreed to take a small class in Livy
on condition that the students write in a special blank-book and review
every day all the words whose meaning they were required to hunt in the
lexicon. At the end of ten weeks half the class read two pages without
looking up more than two words. Their study of Latin not only gave them
a sense of pleasure, but, in thinking the thoughts of the author through
the medium of the eye-symbols and then putting them into good English,
they acquired excellent thought-material, an extensive vocabulary, and
superior skill in syntactical construction. It proved a most valuable
exercise in thinking and in the expression of thought.
[Sidenote: Logical memory.]
Valuable as the mechanical memory is for the purpose of furnishing the
thought-instruments, it sinks into comparative insignificance alongside
of the logical memory. The latter is the memory for ideas, binding them
by associations based on cause and effect, reason and consequence,
similarity and contrast, the general and the particular. It is the kind
of memory by which the mind carries a knowledge of the laws of science,
the principles of art, the salient points of a discourse, the train of
ideas in a book, the leading thoughts in a system of philosophy. It
converts history and geography from a dry collection of facts, dates,
and names into a living organism whose parts are internally related by a
plastic principle, and combined into a whole that has order and system
in every detail. How much better that a pupil’s knowledge of history
and geography should be thus systematized than that it should resemble
a wilderness of facts! As a means for furnishing thought-material, the
logical memory is far more valuable than the memory which holds words and
things by the accidental ties of sound, sight, and fanciful relations.
[Sidenote: Latham’s classification.]
A classification of the forms of memory into portative, analytical, and
assimilative, given in Latham’s book on the “Action of Examinations,” is
helpful in determining the relation of memory to thinking.
[Sidenote: Portative memory.]
The portative memory simply conveys matter. “Its only aim, like that
of a carrier, is to deliver the parcel as it was received.” It is the
form of memory that enables some people to carry the contents of entire
volumes in their minds, sometimes in the very words, oftener in ideas
only. The rhapsodists in ancient Greece who could repeat entire books of
Homer are examples in point. Some men of superior talent have possessed
this power in an eminent degree. Macaulay, on a voyage across the Irish
Channel, rehearsed from memory an entire book of Virgil’s “Æneid.” It is
the kind of memory that shines at examinations and excites the envy of
persons less gifted with powers of retention. It may easily be degraded
into a slave, doing work which should be performed by higher mental
powers. Hence it has been appropriately styled the Cinderella faculty
of the mind. Like the girl in the story, it may be abused dreadfully by
having all sorts of useless drudgery heaped upon it. To require a child
to learn the five thousand isolated facts formerly scattered through
treatises on geography was an exercise as useless as the picking of the
lentils which were poured into the ashes to give Cinderella something to
do, and, unfortunately, there is no bird from fairyland to assist in the
accomplishment of the task.
Much as we may admire the power of Thomas Fuller, who could repeat five
hundred unrelated words in foreign languages after hearing them twice, it
is an accomplishment not worth acquiring. As an accomplishment it recalls
the king to whom a man exhibited his skill in throwing a pea so that it
would stick on the end of a pin,—a feat acquired after years of patient
practice. The man hoped to get a valuable present for his exhibition of
skill. The king ordered a bag of pease to be given him, saying that it
was all his accomplishment was worth.
There is no end of warnings as to the possible evil effects of a good
memory upon the power to think,—warnings that a teacher may take to heart
with advantage to himself and others.
[Sidenote: Memory and the understanding.]
Dr. Carpenter asserts that when the form of memory by which children
learn a piece of poetry whose meaning they do not comprehend exists in
unusual strength, it seems to impede rather than aid the formation of the
nexus of associations which makes acquired knowledge a part of the mind
itself. In illustration, he cites the suggestive case of Dr. Leyden, “who
was distinguished for his extraordinary gift of learning languages, and
who could repeat long acts of Parliament, or any similar document, after
having once read it. Being congratulated by a friend on his remarkable
gift, he replied that, instead of being an advantage to him, it was often
a source of great inconvenience, because, when he wished to recollect
anything in a document he had read, he could only do it by repeating
the whole from the commencement till he reached the point he wished to
recall.”
Latham has well said, “The ready mechanical memory of a youth, besides
enabling him to mislead unpractised examiners, makes him deceive himself.
Teachers find that a very ready memory is a bad educator; it stunts the
growth of other mental powers by doing their work for them. A youth who
can recollect without trouble will, as it were, mask the difficulty in
his classical author or his mathematics by learning by rote what stands
in his translation or text-book, and march forward without more ado. Thus
a quick memory involves a temptation which may enervate its possessor
by suffering him to evade a difficulty instead of bracing himself to
encounter it in front.”[24]
Maudsley writes in the same strain: “This kind of memory, in which
the person seems to read a photographic copy of former impressions
with his mind’s eye, is not, indeed, commonly associated with high
intellectual power; for what reason I know not, unless it be that the
mind, to which it belongs, is prevented, by the very excellence of its
power of apprehending and recalling separate facts, from rising to
that discernment of their relations which is involved in reasoning and
judgment, and so stays in a function which should be the foundation of
further development, or that, being by some natural defect prevented from
rising to the higher sphere of a comprehension of relations, it applies
all its energies to a comprehension of details. Certainly one runs the
risk, by overloading the memory of a child with details, of arresting the
development of the mental powers of the child; stereotyping details on
the brain, we prevent that further development of it which consists in
rising from concrete conceptions to the conception of relations.”[25]
Here is another warning from the pen of Archbishop Whately:
“Some people have been intellectually damaged by having what is called
a good memory. An unskilful teacher is content to put before children
all they ought to learn, and to take care that they remember it; and so,
though the memory is retentive, the mind is left in a passive state, and
men wonder that he who was so quick at learning and remembering should
not be an able man, which is as reasonable as to wonder that a cistern if
filled should not be a perpetual fountain. Many men are saved by their
deficiency of memory from being spoiled by an education; for those who
have no extraordinary memory are driven to supply its place by thinking.
If they do not remember a mathematical demonstration, they are driven to
devise one. If they do not remember what Aristotle or Bacon said, they
are driven to consider what they are likely to have said or ought to have
said.”[26]
In his letter to a student who lamented his defective memory, P. C.
Hamerton says that, so far from writing, as might be expected, a letter
of condolence on a miserable memory, he felt disposed to write a letter
of congratulation. “It is possible that you may be blessed with a
selecting memory which is not only useful for what it retains, but also
for what it rejects. In the immense mass of facts which come before you
in literature and in life it is well that you should suffer as little
bewilderment as possible. The nature of your memory saves you from this
by unconsciously selecting what has interested you and letting the rest
go by.”[27]
[Sidenote: Analytical memory.]
In the last quotation we get a hint of the form of memory which Latham
styles the analytical. “The analytical memory is exercised when the
mind furnishes a view of its own and thereby holds together a set of
impressions selected out of a mass. Thus a barrister strings together the
material facts of his case, and a lecturer those of his science by their
bearing on what he wants to establish.”
Many thinkers sift everything they read, hear, and see. That which they
do not need is rejected and forgotten. That which has a bearing upon
their investigations is selected, retained, and utilized. As an aid in
thinking a form of retention called the index memory is very helpful.
The lawyer should know where to find such law as he does not carry in
his head. Having found the required statute or judicial interpretation,
he applies it to the case in hand. No sooner is a case finally decided
or settled than he drops its details from his mind and directs his
intellectual strength to the interests of the next client.
In this ability to sift, select, and reject, as the occasion demands,
lies the secret of the success of many a public lecturer, of many a
magazine writer. The men in the pulpit or upon the platform who lack
this gift soon wear out; the public speedily detects when they have
nothing more to give. The preparation of debates, speeches, essays, and
theses trains these forms of memory. After the analytical habit has been
formed, the student unconsciously, yet constantly, gathers, classifies,
and stores materials for thought. The public are frequently surprised by
the array of striking facts, interesting data, apt illustrations, and
pleasing anecdotes with which he enlivens every topic of discussion and
elucidates every subject of investigation.
[Sidenote: Assimilative memory.]
Higher than the analytical is the assimilative form of memory which
“absorbs matter into the system so that the knowledge assimilated
becomes a part of the person’s own self, like that of his name or of a
familiar language.” The assimilation of knowledge has a parallel in the
assimilation of food. The phrase that knowledge is the food of the mind
has almost become classical in treatises on education. The figure of
speech throws light upon the relative functions of memory and thinking
in the acquisition and elaboration of knowledge. Before the food is set
before the child it should be cooked and put into the most palatable
form,—a parallel to the preparation of the lesson by the teacher so that
he may put it before the learner in its most attractive form.
Before the food is swallowed it should be masticated, broken into
parts,—a parallel to the act of analysis by which the chunks of knowledge
are resolved into their elements and each set before the mind in the
simplest form, in the form in which it can be grasped most easily.
[Sidenote: Transformation of knowledge.]
If the food remains in the stomach unchanged, it produces dyspepsia and a
long train of bodily ills. If the knowledge which the mind appropriates
is retained unchanged, it produces mental dyspepsia, and there is
no real assimilation. From this point of view we can easily see why
Montaigne said that to know by heart is not to know at all. Just as the
food which is taken into the body must be transformed into chyme and
chyle and blood before it can be assimilated, so the knowledge which is
taken up by the mind must be transformed if it is to be assimilated.
The best illustration of the transformation of knowledge is that given
by an anecdote of Gough, which has now become classic. In a Pullman
car a crying child was disturbing the slumbers of every passenger. At
last a gruff miner, whose patience was exhausted, stuck his head out
of his berth and exclaimed, “I should like to know where that child’s
mother is?” “In the baggage car in a coffin,” was the reply of the
person in charge of the child. The knowledge imparted by that phrase
was immediately transformed into new thought and sentiment and purpose.
There was not another word of complaint throughout the entire journey;
every passenger was thinking of the unfortunate child in the light of an
orphan. Their hearts were stirred with feelings of sympathy, which, in
the case of the old miner, issued into will and purpose, for he got up,
began to carry the little one, and did his best to make it feel contented
in the new surroundings. If the lessons in civil government and history
of the United States remain in the memory a mere tissue of dates, names,
and events, the teacher has failed, no matter how brilliant the answers
in class or at the examination. If these lessons do not issue in new
thoughts, sentiments, and purposes, if they do not enlarge the mental
vision of the pupils, beget in them the sentiment of patriotism and cause
them to resolve that they will support the government by paying a just
share of its taxes and by insisting on a pure ballot,—in a word, if these
lessons do not make the pupil say that he will live for his country and
even die in its defence,—then the teacher has failed because there has
been no adequate assimilation of knowledge.
Another figure of speech is sometimes used to describe the transformation
of knowledge. “Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it
abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it beareth much fruit.”[28] If
the knowledge which enters the mind remains unchanged, it abideth by
itself alone. But if it perish in its original form, if it is changed
through the process of growth so as to enter into new relations, it
brings forth a harvest of thought and sentiment and purpose. The last two
should be the concomitants of the crop of new thoughts which spring from
seed-thoughts implanted in the soul.
That the ancients understood the use and abuse of the memory is evident
from their method of teaching law.
[Sidenote: Teaching the law.]
The Roman school-boy learned by heart the Twelve Tables of the Law.
His teachers were not satisfied with a mere knowledge of the words;
they insisted that he should understand the meaning of the law, and
apply it in regulating his own conduct and in passing judgment upon the
conduct of others. Is it any wonder that the Roman people became the
exponents of law and order throughout the civilized world, and that Roman
jurisprudence still exerts a moulding influence upon the legislation of
the Latin races, if not of the entire civilized world?
There is still another nation of antiquity whose youth were instructed
in the law with the most scrupulous care. The Ten Commandments of the
Mosaic Law were committed to memory. In Chapter VI., 6-9, of Deuteronomy,
we read: “And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in
thine heart: and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children,
and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou
walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.
And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be
as frontlets between thine eyes.” Verse 18 of Chapter XI. is still more
explicit: “Therefore shall ye lay up these my words in your heart and in
your soul, and bind them for a sign upon your hand, that they may be as
frontlets between your eyes.”
The exact words of the law were to be fixed in the memory, and kept both
before the bodily and mental eye until they passed into the deeds and
conduct of every-day life. In John vii. 49 we find the same thought:
“This people who knoweth not the law are cursed.” This was the universal
conviction of the Jewish people after the Babylonian exile, if not
before. The reading of the Talmud has been likened unto travelling
through endless galleries of lumber, where the air is darkened and the
lungs are well-nigh asphyxiated with the rising dust. On one point,
however, the Jewish Rabbis speak with the authority and earnestness of
those who know whereof they affirm. “To the Law!” is the exhortation
sounded abroad in every key. “Let your house,” says one, “be a house of
assembly for those wise in the law; let yourself be dusted by the dust
of their feet, and drink eagerly their teaching.” “Make the study of the
law thy special business,” says another. “The more teaching of the law,”
says a third, “the more life; the more school, the more wisdom; the more
counsel, the more reasonable action. He who gains a knowledge of the law
gains life in the world to come.”
Maxims like the following show the stress that was laid upon exercises
designed to bring out the full force and import of the law: “When two
sit together and do not converse about the law, they are an assembly of
scorners, of which it is said, ‘Sit not in the seat of the scorners.’
When, however, two sit together and converse about the law, the Shechinah
(the Divine Presence) is present among them.” “When three eat together at
one table, and do not converse about the law, it is as though they ate of
the offerings of the dead. But when three eat together at one table and
converse about the law, it is as though they ate at the table of God.”
“The following are things whose interest is enjoyed in this world, while
the capital remains for the world to come; Reverence for fathers and
mothers, benevolence, peacemaking among neighbors, and the study of the
law above them all.”
It is very apparent that the chosen people were not satisfied with
mere memorizing of the law. Their teachers sought to make it a living,
regulative force in all the relations of man. Their practice emphasized
a phase of memory work which should be borne in mind whenever pupils are
requested to learn by heart any form of words or selection of literature.
Words have no value so long as they remain mere words. When words convey
the intended meaning, the more perfect the form in which they are joined
together the deeper and more lasting is the impression made upon the
mind of the learner. The thoughts which have been transmitted in forms
fixed for ages may not produce a harvest of new thought and linguistic
expression, but may issue in feeling and will, in lofty emotions and
noble purposes, in heroic deeds and unselfish devotion, in righteousness
and right conduct far more valuable than mediocre effusions of prose and
poetry, or many of the speculations of scientists and philosophers.
[Sidenote: Seed-thoughts.]