Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals
takes in what is proposed. Concentration, memory, reasoning power,
inventiveness, excellence of the senses,--all are subsidiary to this.
No matter how scatter-brained the type of a man's successive fields
of consciousness may be, if he really _care_ for a subject, he will
return to it incessantly from his incessant wanderings, and first and
last do more with it, and get more results from it, than another
person whose attention may be more continuous during a given interval,
but whose passion for the subject is of a more languid and less
permanent sort. Some of the most efficient workers I know are of the
ultra-scatterbrained type. One friend, who does a prodigious quantity of
work, has in fact confessed to me that, if he wants to get ideas on any
subject, he sits down to work at something else, his best results coming
through his mind-wanderings. This is perhaps an epigrammatic
exaggeration on his part; but I seriously think that no one of us need
be too much distressed at his own shortcomings in this regard. Our mind
may enjoy but little comfort, may be restless and feel confused; but it
may be extremely efficient all the same.
XII. MEMORY
We are following a somewhat arbitrary order. Since each and every
faculty we possess is either in whole or in part a resultant of the play
of our associations, it would have been as natural, after treating of
association, to treat of memory as to treat of interest and attention
next. But, since we did take the latter operations first, we must take
memory now without farther delay; for the phenomena of memory are among
the simplest and most immediate consequences of the fact that our mind
is essentially an associating machine. There is no more pre-eminent
example for exhibiting the fertility of the laws of association as
principles of psychological analysis. Memory, moreover, is so important
a faculty in the schoolroom that you are probably waiting with some
eagerness to know what psychology has to say about it for your help.
In old times, if you asked a person to explain why he came to be
remembering at that moment some particular incident in his previous
life, the only reply he could make was that his soul is endowed with a
faculty called memory; that it is the inalienable function of this
faculty to recollect; and that, therefore, he necessarily at that moment
must have a cognition of that portion of the past. This explanation by a
'faculty' is one thing which explanation by association has superseded
altogether. If, by saying we have a faculty of memory, you mean nothing
more than the fact that we can remember, nothing more than an abstract
name for our power inwardly to recall the past, there is no harm done:
we do have the faculty; for we unquestionably have such a power. But if,
by faculty, you mean a principle of _explanation of our general power to
recall_, your psychology is empty. The associationist psychology, on the
other hand, gives an explanation of each particular fact of
recollection; and, in so doing, it also gives an explanation of the
general faculty. The 'faculty' of memory is thus no real or ultimate
explanation; for it is itself explained as a result of the association
of ideas.
Nothing is easier than to show you just what I mean by this. Suppose I
am silent for a moment, and then say in commanding accents: "Remember!
Recollect!" Does your faculty of memory obey the order, and reproduce
any definite image from your past? Certainly not. It stands staring into
vacancy, and asking, "What kind of a thing do you wish me to remember?"
It needs in short, a _cue_. But, if I say, remember the date of your
birth, or remember what you had for breakfast, or remember the
succession of notes in the musical scale; then your faculty of memory
immediately produces the required result: the _'cue'_ determines its
vast set of potentialities toward a particular point. And if you now
look to see how this happens, you immediately perceive that the cue is
something _contiguously associated_ with the thing recalled. The words,
'date of my birth,' have an ingrained association with a particular
number, month, and year; the words, 'breakfast this morning,' cut off
all other lines of recall except those which lead to coffee and bacon
and eggs; the words, 'musical scale,' are inveterate mental neighbors of
do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, etc. The laws of association govern, in fact,
all the trains of our thinking which are not interrupted by sensations
breaking on us from without. Whatever appears in the mind must be
_introduced_; and, when introduced, it is as the associate of something
already there. This is as true of what you are recollecting as it is of
everything else you think of.
Reflection will show you that there are peculiarities in your memory
which would be quite whimsical and unaccountable if we were forced to
regard them as the product of a purely spiritual faculty. Were memory
such a faculty, granted to us solely for its practical use, we ought to
remember easiest whatever we most _needed_ to remember; and frequency of
repetition, recency, and the like, would play no part in the matter.
That we should best remember frequent things and recent things, and
forget things that are ancient or were experienced only once, could only
be regarded as an incomprehensible anomaly on such a view. But if we
remember because of our associations, and if these are (as the
physiological psychologists believe) due to our organized brain-paths,
we easily see how the law of recency and repetition should prevail.
Paths frequently and recently ploughed are those that lie most open,
those which may be expected most easily to lead to results. The laws of
our memory, as we find them, therefore are incidents of our
associational constitution; and, when we are emancipated from the
flesh, it is conceivable that they may no longer continue to obtain.
We may assume, then, that recollection is a resultant of our associative
processes, these themselves in the last analysis being most probably due
to the workings of our brain.
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 cyclopaedia 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
paedagogic 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.
We have, then, not so much a faculty of memory as many faculties of
memory. We have as many as we have systems of objects habitually thought
of in connection with each other. A given object is held in the memory
by the associates it has acquired within its own system exclusively.