tremely poor visualiser "; and Galton tells us that " men who de- clare themselv.es entirely deficient in the power of seeing mental pictures can become painters " of acknowledged rank. The author knows a musician who has no tonal images whatever; ask him to go to the piano and play a certain composition, and he will do so; ask him if he can imagine what he is going to play, and he will reply, ' No! but I am going to play it.' On the other hand, the author himself, who is no musician, is rarely if ever free from musical imagery.
While these cautions are in place, it should be added that the trend of imaginal type shows itself in various, fairly obvious ways. The attitude of attention is different, according as one is visual or auditory-kinaesthetic; and the mode of recitation differs, being slow and systematic in the former case, quick and impulsive in the latter, while the mistakes made are in both instances characteristic. A preponderant type may be traced in an author's style; and it has been suggested that the cardinal doctrines of the traditional British psychology (§ 105) are to be explained by the fact, evident from their books, that the writers were predominantly visual-minded.
There are also marked individual differences of associa- tion. Observers in the psychological laboratory fall, as do children in the schoolroom, into two great groups: the quick learners and the slow learners. Popular psychology has been all on the side of the slow pupil; if he is slow, he is also sure; his knowledge is solidly established; while his more active-minded companion is pronounced shallow; his knowledge goes as easily as it comes. Retention, we have no need to insist, is a very complicated matter, and there may very well be conditions under which popular psychol- ogy is right. Experiments seem to show, however, that at least under certain circumstances it is definitely wrong. The quick learner appears to retain as well as the slow; he has the advantage at the start, and he loses nothing by lapse of time.
406 Memory and Imagination The results of these experiments throw some light on the nature of cramming, which has for the most part been roundly condemned by educators. Against cramming it may be urged that the hasty impression of a mass of heterogeneous material cannot be lasting; the law of retroactive inhibition will come into play, to weaken the associative tendencies. The student who crams trusts to recency of experience to carry him through; he hopes that a certain amount of his reading will cling to him just for the day or two that he needs it. " Speedy oblivion," says James, " is the almost inevitable fate of all that is committed to memory in this simple way."
Even so, one might rejoin that speedy oblivion is not in itself a disadvantage; a good deal that we are obliged to learn at school is better forgotten. But, that aside, the argument against cram- ming misses the point that there are two kinds of cramming, a good as well as a bad. If we wish to remember, we must submit to the laws of memory; and bad cramming simply ignores those laws. Good cramming, on the other hand, is a very valuable asset of the quick learner. It is " the rapid acquisition of a series of facts, the vigorous getting up of a case, in order to exhibit well- trained powers of comprehension" j1 it is precisely the thing that the lawyer, the lecturer, the teacher, the politician, the adminis- trator find necessary to success. Moreover, good cramming is itself of two kinds: we may cram with intent to remember, and we may cram with intent to forget. Both forms are useful, e.g., to the teacher: the one provides him with the expert's knowledge of the details of his subject; the other prevents his teaching from becoming cut and dried.
As with cramming, so with skimming: it is generally repro- bated. Yet it is surprising how accurate a knowledge may be acquired by hurried, selective reading, if only one has had sufficient practice. The predisposition to quick learning must, of course, be present. What that is. in physiological terms, we do not know; but it is, at any rate, a gift, like mathematical ability or a singing voice, and should be utilised rather than disparaged.
§ U5- The Recognitive Consciousness 407 § 115. The Recognitive Consciousness. — Suppose that you are entering a street-car. As you enter, you run your eyes over the line of faces before you. The first half dozen of your fellow-passengers are strangers; their faces arouse no interest, do not arrest your gaze. At the end of the car, however, you see someone whom you know; you recognise him. A sudden change occurs in consciousness: you call him by name, take a seat at his side, and begin to converse with him. What was it, now, that happened in consciousness at the moment of recognition? What are the conscious pro- cesses involved in recognising?
To answer these questions we must recur to facts that we already know. The first is the fact that every sensory stimulus of moderate intensity arouses a widespread organic reaction (§ 60); an illustration is given on p. 194. The second is the fact that the organism not only senses, but also feels; sensory stimuli do more than arouse the sensation and the associative and organic reaction; they set up feel- ings as well (§ 68). These secondary effects of stimulation give us the key to the psychology of recognition. The re- peated stimulus is felt otherwise than the novel stimulus, and the feeling of familiarity, as we may call it, is the essen- tial factor in recognising; whenever it appears, we recog- nise; where it does not appear, we fail to recognise. The sensations and ideas of the associative and organic reac- tion then serve to make the recognition definite; the per- ception comes to us, not merely as familiar, but with the es- pecial familiarity of a named, placed, and dated experience.
The reaction set up by a stimulus consists in part of associated ideas, in part of kinaesthetic and other organic complexes. It is tempting to suppose that the associated ideas help to constitute recognition. They may, indeed, as we shall see in a moment, be 408 Memory and Imagination the means to recognition; and some of them — more particularly the direct verbal associate, the name — seem oftentimes to be bound up with the actual process of recognising. Nevertheless, the experimental evidence is against them. Recognition is possible in the absence of any associated idea whatsoever; and a perception may call up objectively correct associates and still not be recognised.
In the case of the organic complexes, decision is more difficult. We have introspective warrant for believing that they enable us to recognise the perception as that special perception. Whether they enter into the process of recognising is difficult to say, be- cause they blend with the organic complexes comprised in the feeling of familiarity. So far as it goes, the evidence is also against them; recognition, as such, seems to be wholly a matter of the feeling.
What, then, is this feeling? In experiments upon recognition it is variously reported as a glow of warmth, a sense of ownership, a feeling of intimacy, a sense of being at home, a feeling of ease, a comfortable feeling. It is a feeling in the narrower sense (p. 228), pleasurable in its affective quality, diffusively organic in its sensory character. That is all that analysis can tell us about it. If we allow ourselves to speculate, we may go further, and find a genetic sanction for its peculiar warmth and diffusion; we may suppose that it is a weakened survival of the emotion of relief, of fear unfulfilled. To an animal so defenceless as was primitive man, the strange must always have been cause for anxiety; ' fear ' is, by its etymology, the emotion of the ' farer,' of the traveller away from home. The bodily attitude which ex- presses recognition is, on this view, still the attitude of relief from tension, of ease and confidence.1 1 Speculations of this sort are permissible in psychology, but must be ad- mitted only very cautiously into one's psychological thinking; their value de- pends partly upon their explanatory power, partly upon their agreement with what we know, or on other grounds can infer, of the nature of primitive mind; they are always speculations. It is clear that they involve the great question of biological heredity, into which it is here impossible to enter. The author can do no more than point out that they do not necessarily involve the direct transmission of mind, or of mental traits, from generation to generation; still less, the transmission of acquired characters.
It must be added that some psychologists refuse to recognise the feeling of familiarity as a feeling, and regard it rather as a form of combination (§ 104), an ultimate and underivable mental character; they speak of it as the quality of familiarity. There are, indeed, border-line experiences between recognition proper and direct apprehension (which we discuss below), where analysis is well-nigh impossible. But the author has read many thousands of introspective reports upon recognition, and has never yet found an observer to whom the feeling of familiarity appealed as unana- lysable.
Definite and Indefinite Recognition. — Recognition appears in two typical forms, which nevertheless grade into each other through various intermediate stages. It is indefinite when the feeling of familiarity comes up alone; when, e.g., we pass some one in the street, and say to our companion, ' I'm sure I know that face! ' Somewhat more definite are the cases of recogni- tion in which the feeling of familiarity expresses itself by a general classificatory term. As we glance down the line of strangers in the street-car, we may think to ourselves, ' Doctor, — farmer, — commercial traveller.' Lastly, recognition may be definite: the reinstatement of the organic reaction, or the arousal of a group of associated ideas, or both of these supplements together, may refer the present experience, unequivocally, to an incident of the past. In the gross recognitions of everyday life there is usually some constellation of associated ideas that is evoked by the perception; in the recognitions of the laboratory, the recurrence of the organic reaction makes the stimulus — as the reports phrase it — 'stand out,' makes it ' easy to grasp,' gives it a direct ' appeal ' to con- sciousness; it is then identified as the stimulus that was presented before.
Direct and Indirect Recognition. — When we classify recognitions as definite and indefinite, we are thinking of them as already completed. If we look at their temporal course, the way in which they are effected, we get a new ground of classification. Recog- nition is direct or immediate when the perception at once, of itself, calls up the recognitive feeling. Recognition is indirect or mediate when the feeling attaches, not directly to the perception, 410 Memory and Imagination but to some associate of the perception. We pass a stranger on the street; but we are suddenly hailed by a familiar voice, and the stranger is himself recognised as an old friend. We try to find our host's face in a group-photograph of schoolboys, and we are wholly puzzled to identify him. The face is pointed out, and recognition follows; the photograph grows more and more like, the more closely we examine it. In many instances of this sort the recognitive consciousness shows a high degree of complexity. Thus, we may be quite sure that the stranger is our old friend, and yet continue to recognise nothing about him but his voice; the feeling of familiarity alternates with the feeling of strange- ness, and the play of association becomes extremely complicated. In principle, however, the conscious mechanism of recognition is the same throughout.
Lack of Recognition. — Failure to recognise is not a mere ab- sence of recognition, a conscious blank; it is a positive expe- rience. The unfamiliar perception, like the familiar, stands out clear in the focus of consciousness, but its setting is different. It is not easy to grasp, and it makes no appeal; it is accompanied by a feeling of strangeness, and by a general attitude of conscious- ness which we may call the attitude of search or enquiry. We may guess that the feeling of strangeness is the modern represent- ative of primitive man's anxiety in face of the unknown; it is an uneasy restlessness, distinctly unpleasant (p. 269). The conscious attitudes will occupy us later (§ 141).
§ 116. Recognition and Direct Apprehension. — The ner- vous system as a whole, no less than the various sense- organs, adapts itself to repeated stimuli. Affective pro- cesses, as we know (§ 69), show this phenomenon of adaptation; pleasantness and unpleasantness fade out into indifference. And the organic stir aroused by an affective stimulus is more and more reduced, until it disappears altogether.
It is not to be expected, then, that the feeling of famil- iarity will persist unchanged, as perceptions are repeated.
We can, in fact, hardly be said to recognise the clothes that we put on every morning, or the pen with which we are accustomed to write; we take them for granted. When familiarity has gone thus far, when the familiar has ceased to evoke an organic reaction and to be pleasant, we say that recognition has passed into direct apprehension.
We have here an instance of the operation of a psychological law to which reference was made in § 103, the universal law of mental growth and decay. Just as meaning may cease to be conscious, and may be carried in purely physiological terms, so may recognition be reduced from a conscious process to an un- conscious cortical set. Between the two extremes there are, naturally, many intermediates. The feeling of familiarity, the feeling of being at home, changes first to something that is still feeling, though much weaker on the affective and much less clear upon the sensory side, — to what we may describe as an 'of course ' feeling, which is still some distance removed from sheer indifference. As time goes on, this of-course feeling itself dies out; the affective adaptation reaches its term, and the perception fails to arouse any organic reaction.
In the author's opinion, the shift from consciousness to uncon- sciousness may be complete. Some psychologists, however, be- lieve that direct apprehension always involves consciousness. We not only perceive objects by eye or ear; we move to them, turn to them, stand or sit to them, handle them. Hence, although the feeling of familiarity has disappeared, the sight or sound will throw us into a certain bodily attitude, whose sensory or imaginal representation constitutes our apprehension of the object. That is the theory. The author's principal objection to it is that it appears to confuse recognition with meaning. The essential thing in recognition, as experiments prove, is a feeling, the feeling of familiarity; the associated sensations arising from bodily atti- tude, from action upon the object, may help to render recognition definite, but do not constitute recognition. We can hardly argue, then, that these sensations constitute recognition (direct appre- 412 Memory and Imagination prehension) after the loss of the feeling. Kinaesthetic contexts are common vehicles of meaning; they may constitute an object a pen, or even — in a certain sense — my pen; they cannot con- stitute it my familiar pen. It is not difficult to make the objection concrete. An old suit of clothes goes to the cleaner, an old type- writer goes to the repairer. We say, on their return, that the clothes must be ours, because they slip on so easily, and that the machine must be ours, because we work it so readily; but, we add, we should never have recognised them as ours. That is, the kinaesthetic complexes give them meaning, even a definite refer- ence to our own past; but they do not, of necessity, involve recognition. And if that is true, there is no reason why they should involve or constitute direct apprehension, which, by hypothesis, is the descendant of recognition. The theory implies that, when the feeling of familiarity is gone, nothing but meaning remains; the author holds that direct apprehension is not identical with meaning.
Another and more general objection is that there are many per- ceptions in which kinaesthesis is not noticeably concerned. I see the same landscape every day from my bedroom window, and I apprehend it directly as that same landscape. It is true that I look at it, turn to it; but I look at it from many angles, with head and eyes in various positions, so that the kinaesthetic components must, at the best, be extremely variable; and, as a matter of fact, the eye-movements are rarely conscious, and the sensations due to movements of head and body are usually incorporated in other perceptions. It seems impossible that a kinaesthetic complex can constitute my direct apprehension of the landscape. Moreover, there are cases of direct apprehension, under laboratory conditions, in which no trace of kinaesthesis can be discovered.
Disturbance of Apprehension. — It is interesting to note what happens in consciousness if direct apprehension is for some reason prevented. We look at our inkstand, and find that the pen which we always keep in it has disappeared; or we glance round the breakfast room, and discover that a picture which always hangs on a certain wall is absent. We have not been in the habit of recognis- ing pen and picture; they are too familiar. But now that they are § 117. The Memory Consciousness 413 gone, the situation jars upon us; we have a feeling of helplessness or of unpleasant surprise. This observation is itself important: it shows that, when the organism has become adapted to a certain complex of stimuli, the maintenance of adaptation depends upon the persistence of the complex; a negative change, a subtraction of stimuli, creates a new situation, to which the organism reacts as a whole. There is, however, another side to the case which is, perhaps, still more important. At the moment of conscious dis- turbance, before the unpleasant feeling has arisen, the of-course feeling springs up in unusual strength; it is as if, for a brief space, we reverted in imagination to a recognition of the missing object. The feeling is not intensive if measured by any absolute standard, not as strong as the feeling of familiarity proper; but it is more pronounced than in the ordinary intermediate forms that connect recognition with direct apprehension. Here, then, is opportunity for the introspection of an elusive process, the conditions of whose appearance are otherwise not easy to arrange.
§ 117. The Memory Consciousness. — Hitherto we have said nothing of the conscious side of memory. We have spoken of impression, associative tendency, retention, and we have spoken of image, idea, and the association of ideas; but no image or idea is intrinsically a memory-image or a memory-idea, and no association necessarily wears the stamp of memory. An idea comes to us as remembered only if it comes to us as consciously familiar. And the memory consciousness is, in fact, the recognitive conscious- ness over again, with the sole difference that the focal process, the process remembered, is an idea and not a per- ception. An idea is a memory if it is accompanied by the feeling of familiarity; and an idea is specifically re- membered if it is placed and dated by the organic reaction and by associated ideas.
The consciousness in which the memory-idea is set may show the pattern either of primary or of secondary atten- 414 Memory and Imagination tion (pp. 275 f.), and we speak accordingly of passive memory or remembrance, and of active memory or recol- lection. Both types of consciousness are discursive; that is, are characterised by wandering of attention, shift of imagery, variable play of association. Remembrance shades off into day-dreaming or reverie, and thus into imagination; recollection shades off into search or enquiry, and thus into thought. Between the two lies a long series of intermediate forms.
The introduction of nonsense syllables, while it led us back from logical meaning to psychological fact, and so helped to break up the schematism of the traditional psychology of association, has nevertheless done psychology a certain disservice. It has tended to place the emphasis rather upon organism than upon mind; investigation has been directed to the question of what the ner- vous system does rather than to that of what the memory con- sciousness is. The knowledge thus acquired is, no doubt, of high psychological importance, and we have taken account of it in preceding Sections. But the definiteness of result, the fascination of tracing the criss-cross of associative tendencies, and the possibil- ity of throwing the results into quantitative form, — these things have forced into the background of current interest the more immediately psychological problem of a description of the memory consciousness. Introspective studies are comparatively few, and generalisation must be premature.
However, something may be said. If we take, first, the pattern of consciousness in recollection, we find what may be figuratively described as a reconstruction along the line of least resistance. Thus, in trying to recall a group of meaningless visual forms, and to draw them from memory, the observer does not start out with a ready-made image. He may begin with a mere fragment of imagery, or with no imagery at all. As he begins to draw, the recognitive feeling at once appears, rejecting here and accepting there; and it remains in consciousness to determine the whole course of recall and the nature of the final product, as well as to § 117. The Memory Consciousness 415 react upon that product when present in perceptual form. Another very prominent feature of the recollecting consciousness is the emotive attitude of expected ease or difficulty of recall; this also may intervene as soon as the first clue, such as an indefinite visual image of position, has arisen. The drawing, then, is not a repro- duction, a copy of the original perception, mediated by retention; it is a reconstruction, a construction of a particular result that is accepted in place of the original.
If the figures to be recalled are pictures of familiar objects, the gross clue to the recollection may be given by a visual image. But the details are again worked out by a process of reconstruction. The criteria of acceptance are direct recognition of an image; relative clearness of imagery (though this is ineffective as against even a very weak recognitive feeling); absence of rival imagery; and the observer's general knowledge of the objects pictured. Here, too, we are far removed from a simple reproduction.
Nevertheless, the reconstruction follows the line of least nervous resistance. There is a tendency, so far as mental constitution per- mits, to recall in kind: visual perception by visual imagery, audi- tory perception by auditory imagery. Familiar verbal associations, especially names, are used as aids to recall. Familiar sounds are recalled by way of the kinaesthetic processes aroused in their imita- tion. The image tends to lose its specificity and to approach a type or mean: a voice, at first imaged in its individual timbre, is presently called up as bass or tenor only. In the recall of pictures, the observer falls into a form of the stimulus-error, and replaces the imagery of the picture by that of the object pictured.
This account, fragmentary as it is, will suffice both to indicate the general character of consciousness in recollection, and to illustrate the difficulty of adequate introspection. The observer has to describe processes of extreme complexity, and will naturally turn first to what is most emphatic or to what he is most confidently ex- pecting. The field must be raked over again and yet again before we can be sure that we have gathered up the full introspective yield. Moreover, the observer has to report complexes that are hurrying through consciousness and changing as they go; he is therefore likely to report in large, general terms; he has no time 416 Memory and Imagination for analysis; he points a verbal finger at the retreating process, and therewith turns to its successor. But then every one of these, largely designated processes must be made the topic of a special analysis; so that a memory study may really set more problems than it solves. There is, indeed, a vast range of work, directly in view, that still remains to be done.
As regards the pattern of consciousness in remembrance, our data are yet more scanty. There seems to be, behind the recog- nitive feeling, a general emotive attitude that holds us, so to say, to the same objective situation, to the same empirical context. This attitude serves as conscious background for processes of extra- ordinary instability. Attention is labile and fluid; the focus of consciousness is occupied now by visual or other imagery, now by scraps of kinaesthesis, now by personal references, organic or verbal; consciousness itself contracts and expands, pauses and hur- ries, and shows the most abrupt changes of direction. The author is well aware that this description is both figurative and conventional. It will, however, be a long time before psychologists can offer a composite photograph of the total consciousness in re- membrance.
§ 1 1 8. The Memory-image and the Image of Imagination. — In minds of the visual type, imaginal complexes, of the same general degree of complexity as perceptions, are of common occurrence, and may readily be aroused under experimental conditions. These complexes fall into two great groups. Some of them have a personal reference, and represent definite incidents of the observer's past ex- perience; others lack the personal reference, and have no associations either of time or of place. The former, in other words, are what would ordinarily be termed memory- images; the latter are images of imagination.
The two kinds of images present marked differences to introspection, but the differences are precisely the reverse of what, under the influence of popular psychology, we might expect. Popular psychology regards the memory- image as a stable copy of past perception, and the image of imagination as subject to kaleidoscopic change. In fact, it is the memory-image that varies, and the image of imagination that is stable.
The observer is placed, as he prefers, in a dark room, or in the light, facing a blank wall, and is asked to report his images as they appear; words or sentences are spoken by the experimenter, as cues for the arousal of memory and imagination. It is found that the memory-images are filmy and vaporous, that they show little or no relief and little or no diversity of light and shade, and that they are often colourless, while the images of imagination are substantial, extend into the third dimension, and are often highly coloured. The memory-images develope slowly, are liable to continual change, and last but a short time; the images of imagi- nation present themselves at once and as wholes, change but little, if at all, and are persistent. The memory-images involve roving eye-movements and general motor restlessness; the images of im- agination involve steady fixation and motor quiescence. Both images are accompanied by, or interfused with, kinaesthetic and other organic processes, but the character of the processes is different. Kinaesthesis comes in to fill out the gaps and blanks in the memory-image; the observer sometimes remarks that he can't say what he sees and what he feels. This filling or supplementing is always of an imitative sort, repeating certain phases of the original experience. In imagination, on the other hand, the organic factors are empathic: x thus, with the image of a fish, an observer reported " cool, pleasant sensations all up my arms; slip- pery feeling in my throat; coolness in my eyes; the object spreads all over me and I over it; it is not referred to me, but I belong to it." Finally, the image of memory brings with it the pleasurable recog- nitive feeling, whereas the image of imagination is set upon a background of feeling which the observers variously describe 1 Empathy (a word formed on the analogy of sympathy) is the name given to that process of humanising objects, of reading or feeling ourselves into them, which we described on p. 333.
41 8 Memory and Imagination as a feeling of strangeness, of novelty, of personal detachment, of creepiness, of weirdness, of unordinariness, of peculiar discomfort.
The same phenomena recur with auditory and olfactory images. Auditory memory-images involve movements of the larynx, and olfactory memory-images involve twitchings of the nostrils, which are not found with images of imagination. In both cases, the memory-images are less substantial than the images of imagination, and run a different temporal course. The characteristic feelings, of familiarity and strangeness, appear as they do with visual images.