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Page 30
Descending more particularly into the faculty of memory, we have to
distinguish between its potential aspect as a magazine or storehouse and
its actual aspect as recollection now of a particular event. Our memory
contains all sorts of items which we do not now recall, but which we may
recall, provided a sufficient cue be offered. Both the general retention
and the special recall are explained by association. An educated memory
depends on an organized system of associations; and its goodness depends
on two of their peculiarities: first, on the persistency of the
associations; and, second, on their number.
Let us consider each of these points in turn.
First, the persistency of the associations. This gives what may be
called the _quality of native retentiveness_ to the individual. If, as I
think we are forced to, we consider the brain to be the organic
condition by which the vestiges of our experience are associated with
each other, we may suppose that some brains are 'wax to receive and
marble to retain.' The slightest impressions made on them abide. Names,
dates, prices, anecdotes, quotations, are indelibly retained, their
several elements fixedly cohering together, so that the individual soon
becomes a walking cyclop�dia of information. All this may occur with no
philosophic tendency in the mind, no impulse to weave the materials
acquired into anything like a logical system. In the books of anecdotes,
and, more recently, in the psychology-books, we find recorded instances
of monstrosities, as we may call them, of this desultory memory; and
they are often otherwise very stupid men. It is, of course, by no means
incompatible with a philosophic mind; for mental characteristics have
infinite capacities for permutation. And, when both memory and
philosophy combine together in one person, then indeed we have the
highest sort of intellectual efficiency. Your Walter Scotts, your
Leibnitzes, your Gladstones, and your Goethes, all your folio copies of
mankind, belong to this type. Efficiency on a colossal scale would
indeed seem to require it. For, although your philosophic or systematic
mind without good desultory memory may know how to work out results and
recollect where in the books to find them, the time lost in the
searching process handicaps the thinker, and gives to the more ready
type of individual the economical advantage.
The extreme of the contrasted type, the type with associations of small
persistency, is found in those who have almost no desultory memory at
all. If they are also deficient in logical and systematizing power, we
call them simply feeble intellects; and no more need to be said about
them here. Their brain-matter, we may imagine, is like a fluid jelly, in
which impressions may be easily made, but are soon closed over again, so
that the brain reverts to its original indifferent state.
But it may occur here, just as in other gelatinous substances, that an
impression will vibrate throughout the brain, and send waves into other
parts of it. In cases of this sort, although the immediate impression
may fade out quickly, it does modify the cerebral mass; for the paths it
makes there may remain, and become so many avenues through which the
impression may be reproduced if they ever get excited again. And its
liability to reproduction will depend of course upon the variety of
these paths and upon the frequency with which they are used. Each path
is in fact an associated process, the number of these associates
becoming thus to a great degree a substitute for the independent
tenacity of the original impression. As I have elsewhere written: Each
of the associates is a hook to which it hangs, a means to fish it up
when sunk below 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, _the one who thinks over his experiences most_, and weaves
them into the most systematic relations with each other, will be the one
with the best memory.
But, if our ability to recollect a thing be so largely a matter of its
associations with other things which thus becomes its cues, an important
p�dagogic consequence follows. _There can be no improvement of the
general or elementary faculty of memory: there can only be improvement
of our memory for special systems of associated things_; and this
latter improvement is due to the way in which the things in question are
woven into association with each other in the mind. Intricately or
profoundly woven, they are held: disconnected, they tend to drop out
just in proportion as the native brain retentiveness is poor. And no
amount of training, drilling, repeating, and reciting employed upon the
matter of one system of objects, the history-system, for example, will
in the least improve either the facility or the durability with which
objects belonging to a wholly disparate system--the system of facts of
chemistry, for instance--tend to be retained. That system must be
separately worked into the mind by itself,--a chemical fact which is
thought about in connection with the other chemical facts, tending then
to stay, but otherwise easily dropping out.
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