112 TALKS TO TEACHERS it be inhuman, make it figure as part of a story. If it be difficult, couple its acquisition with some prospect of personal gain. Above all things, make sure that it shall run through certain inner changes, since no unvarying object can possibly hold the mental field for long. Let your pupil wander from one aspect to another of your sub- ject, if you do not wish him to wander from it altogether to something else, variety in unity be- ing the secret of all interesting talk and thought. The relation of all these things to the native genius of the instructor is too obvious to need comment again.
One more point, and I am done with the subject of attention. There is unquestionably a great native variety among individuals in the type of their attention. Some of us are naturally scatter- brained, and others follow easily a train of con- nected thoughts without temptation to swerve aside to other subjects. This seems to depend on a difference between individuals in the type of their field of consciousness. In some persons this is highly focalized and concentrated, and the focal ideas predominate in determining association. In others we must suppose the margin to be brighter, CAN MIND-WANDERING BE CURED 113 and to be filled with something hke meteoric showers of images, which strike into it at random, displacing the focal ideas, and carrying association in their own direction. Persons of the latter type find their attention wandering every minute, and must bring it back by a voluntary pull. The others sink into a subject of meditation deeply, and, when interrupted, are 'lost' for a moment before they come back to the outer world.
The possession of such a steady faculty of at- tention is unquestionably a great boon. Those who have it can work more rapidly, and with less nervous wear and tear. I am inclined to think that no one who is without it naturally can by any amount of drill or discipline attain it in a veiy high degree. Its amount is probably a fixed char- acteristic of the individual. But I wish to make a remark here which I shall have occasion to make again in other connections. It is that no one need deplore unduly the inferiority in himself of any one elementary faculty. This concentrated type of attention is an elementary faculty: it is one of the things that might be ascertained and measured by exercises in the laboratory. But, having ascertained it in a number of persons, we could never rank them in a scale of actual and 114 TALKS TO TEACHERS practical mental efficiency based on its degrees. The total mental efficiency of a man is the result- ant of the working together of all his faculties. He is too complex a being for any one of them to have the casting vote. If any one of them do have the casting vote, it is more likely to be the strength of his desire and passion, the strength of the interest he takes in what is proposed. Con- centration, memory, reasoning power, inventive- ness, 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 effi- cient workers I know are of the ultra-scatter- brained 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; ATTENTION, CONCLUDED 115 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 exhib- iting the fertility of the laws of association as principles of psychological analysis. Memory, moreover, is so important a faculty in the school- room 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 SHALL WE CALL MEMOEY A FACULTY 117 some particular incident in his previous life, the only replj^ he could make was that his soul is endowed with a faculty called memory; that it is the inaUenable function of this faculty to recol- lect; 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 super- seded 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 expla- nation of our general power to recall, your psychol- ogy is empty. The associationist psychology, on the other hand, gives an explanation of each par- ticular 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 ulti- mate 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: "Rcmem- 118 TALKS TO TEACHERS ber! Recollect!" Does your faculty of memory obey the order, and reproduce any definite image from your past? Certainly not. It stands star- ing 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 im- mediately 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 ex- cept 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 sen- sations breaking on us from without. Whatever appears in the mind must be introduced; and, when introduced, it is as the associate of some- \ „!
\ „!
PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS OF MEMORY 119 thing 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 peculi- arities in your memory which would be quite whimsical and unaccountable if we were forced to regard them as the product of a purely spir- itual 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 repeti- tion, 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 incomprehen- sible anomaly on such a view. But if we remem- ber 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 120 TALKS TO TEACHERS 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 them- selves 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 particu- lar 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 mem- ory depends on an organized system of associa- tions; and its goodness depends on two of their peculiarities: first, on the persistency of the asso- ciations; 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 THE GIFT OF ORGANIC RETENTIVENESS 121 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, an- ecdotes, 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 philo- sophic tendency in the mind, no impulse to weave the materials acquired into anji:hing like a logical system. In the books of anecdotes, and, more re- cently, in the psychology-books, we find recorded instances of monstrosities, as we may call them, of this desultory memory; and they are often other- wise 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 phi- losophy combine together in one person, then in- deed we have the highest sort of intellectual eflEiciency. Your Walter Scotts, your Leibnitzes, your Gladstones, and your Goethes, all your folio copies of mankind, belong to this type. Effi- ciency on a colossal scale would indeed seem to require it. For, although your philosophic or systematic mind without good desultory memory 122 TALKS TO TEACHERS 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 sys- tematizing power, we call them simply feeble in- tellects; 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 gelati- nous 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 re- produced if they ever get excited again. And its liability to reproduction will depend of course upon the variety of these paths and upon the fre- THE SECRET OF A GOOD MEMORY 123 quency 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 sub- stitute 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 associa- tions 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 psedagogic consequence follows. There can he no improvement of the general or elementary faculty of memory: there can only he improvement of our mem- ory for special systems of associated things; and 124 TALKS TO TEACHERS this latter improvement is due to the way in which the things in question are woven into asso- ciation 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 re- citing employed upon the matter of one system of objects, the history-system, for example, will in the least improve either the facihty 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 drop- ping out.
We have, then, not so much a faculty of mem- ory 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. Learning the facts of another system will in no wise help it to stay in the mind, for the simple MEMORIES RATHER THAN MEMORY 125 reason that it has no 'cues' within that other system.
We see examples of this on eveiy hand. Most men have a good memory for facts con- nected with their own pm-suits. A college ath- lete, who remains a dunce at his books, may amaze you by his knowledge of the 'records' at various feats and games, and prove himself 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 astonishes outsiders, but which the amount of thinking they bestow on these subjects easUy explains.
The great memory' for facts which a Darwin or a Spencer reveal in their books is not incompati- ble with the possession on their part of a mind with only a middUng degree of physiological re- tentiveness. Let a man early in life set himself the task of verifying such a theory as that of evo- lution, and facts will soon cluster and cling to him like grapes to their stem. Their relations to the 126 TALKS TO TEACHERS theory will hold them fast; and, the more of these the mind is able to discern, the greater the erudi- tion will become. Meanwhile the theorist may have little, if any, desultory memory. Unutiliza- ble facts may be unnoted by him, and forgotten as soon as heard. An ignorance almost as ency- clopedic as his erudition may coexist with the latter, and hide, as it were, within the interstices of its web. Those of you who have had much to do with scholars and savants will readily think of examples of the class of mind I mean.
The best possible sort of system into which to weave an object, mentally, is a rational system, or what is called a 'science,' Place the thing in its pigeon-hole in a classificatory series; explain it logically by its causes, and deduce from it its necessary effects; find out of what natural law it is an instance, — and you then know it in the best of all possible ways. A 'science' is thus the greatest of labor-saving contrivances. It relieves the memory of an immense number of details, re- placing, as it does, merely contiguous associations by the logical ones of identity, similarity, or anal- ogy. If you know a 'law,' you may discharge your memory of masses of particular instances, for the law will reproduce them for you whenever TECHNICAL MNEMONICS 127 you require them. The law of refraction, for ex- ample: If you know that, you can with a pencil and a bit of paper immediately discern how a con- vex lens, a concave lens, or a prism, must sever- ally alter the appearance of an object. But, if you don't know the general law, you must charge your memory separately with each of the three kinds of effect.
A 'philosophic' system, in which all things fomid their rational explanation and were con- nected together as causes and effects, would be the perfect mnemonic system, in which the great- est economy of means would bring about the greatest richness of results. So that, if we have poor desultory memories, we can save ourselves by cultivating the philosophic turn of mind.
There are many artificial systems of mnemonics, some public, some sold as secrets. They are all so many devices for training us into certain me- thodical and stereotjy'ped ways of thinking about the facts we seek to retain. Even were I competent, I could not here go into these systems in any de- tail. But a single example, from a popular sys- tem, will show what I mean. I take the number- alphabet, the great nmemonic device for recollect- ing numbers and dates. In this system each digit 128 TALKS TO TEACHERS is represented by a consonant, thus: 1 is ^ or d; 2, n; 3, w; 4, r; 5, I; 6, sh, j, ch, or g; 7, c, A:, g, or qu; 8, / or v; 9, 6 or p; 0, s, c, or z. Suppose, now, you wish to remember the velocity of sound, 1,142 feet a second: t, t, r, n, are the letters you must use. They make the consonants of tight run, and it would be a 'tight run' for you to keep up such a speed. So 1649, the date of the execution of Charles I., may be remembered by the word sharp, which recalls the headsman's axe.
Apart from the extreme difficulty of finding words that are appropriate in this exercise, it is clearly an excessively poor, trivial, and silly way of 'thinking' about dates; and the way of the historian is much better. He has a lot of land- mark-dates already in his mind. He knows the historic concatenation of events, and can usually place an event at its right date in the chronology- table, by thinking of it in a rational way, referring it to its antecedents, tracing its concomitants and consequences, and thus ciphering out its date by connecting it with theirs. The artificial memory- systems, recommending, as they do, such irrational methods of thinking, are only to be recommended for the first landmarks in a system, or for such WHY CRA.MMING IS BAD 129 purely detached facts as enjoy no rational connec- tion with the rest of our ideas. Thus the student of physics may remember the order of the spectral colours by the word vibgyor which their initial letters make. The student of anatomy may re- member the position of the Mitral valve on the Left side of the heart by thinking that L. M. stands also for 'long meter' in the hymn-books.
You now see why 'cramming' must be so poor a mode of study. Cramming seeks to stamp things in by intense application immediately before the ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form but few associations. On the other hand, the same thing recurring on different days, in different con- texts, read, recited on, referred to again and again, related to other things and reviewed, gets well wrought into the mental structure. This is the reason why you should enforce on your pupils habits of continuous application. There is no moral turpitude in cramming. It would be the best, because the most economical, mode of study if it led to the results desired. But it does not, and your older pupils can readily be made to see the reason why.
It follows also, from what has been said, that the popular idea that 'the Memory,^ in the sense of 130 TALKS TO TEACHERS a general elementary faculty, can be improved by training, is a great mistake. Your memory for facts of a certain class can be improved very much by training in that class of facts, because the in- coming new fact will then find all sorts of ana- logues and associates already there, and these will keep it liable to recall. But other kinds of fact will reap none of that benefit, and, unless one have been also trained and versed in their class, will be at the mercy of the mere crude retentive- ness of the individual, which, as we have seen, is practically a fixed quantity. Nevertheless, one often hears people say: "A great sin was com- mitted against me in my youth: my teachers entirely failed to exercise my memory. If they had only made me learn a lot of things by heart at school, I should not be, as I am now, forgetful of everything I read and hear." This is a great mistake: learning poetry by heart will make it easier to learn and remember other poetry, but nothing else; and so of dates; and so of chemis- try and geography.
But, after what I have said, I am sure you wilJ need no farther argument on this point; and I therefore pass it by.
VERBAL MEMORIZING 131 But, since it has brought me to speak of learn- ing things by heart, I think that a general prac- tical remark about verbal memorizing may now not be out of place. The excesses of old-fash- ioned verbal memorizing, and the immense ad- vantages of object-teaching in the earlier stages of culture, have perhaps led those who philoso- phize about teaching to an unduly strong reaction; and learning things by heart is now probably somewhat too much despised. For, when all is said and done, the fact remains that verbal ma- terial is, on the whole, the handiest and most use- ful material in which thinking can be carried on. Abstract conceptions are far and away the most economical instruments of thought, and abstract conceptions are fixed and incarnated for us in words. Statistical inquiry would seem to show that, as men advance in life, they tend to make less and less use of visual images, and more and more use of words. One of the first things that Mr. Galton discovered was that this appeared to be the case with the members of the Royal Society whom he questioned as to their mental images. I should say, therefore, that constant exercise in verbal memorizing must still be an indispensable feature in all sound education. Nothing is more 132 TALKS TO TEACHERS deplorable than that inarticulate and helpless sort of mind that is reminded by everything of some quotation, case, or anecdote, which it cannot now exactly recollect. Nothing, on the other hand, is more convenient to its possessor, or more delight- ful to his comrades, than a mind able, in telling a story, to give the exact words of the dialogue or to furnish a quotation accurate and complete. In every branch of study there are happily turned, concise, and handy formulas which in an incom- parable way sum up results. The mind that can retain such formulas is in so far a superior mind, and the communication of them to the pupil ought always to be one of the teacher's favorite tasks.
In learning 'by heart,' there are, however, efficient and inefficient methods; and, by making the pupil skilful in the best method, the teacher can both interest hun and abridge the task. The best method is of course not to 'hammer in' the sentences, by mere reiteration, but to analyze them, and think. For example, if the pupil should have to learn this last sentence, let him first strip out its grammatical core, and learn, "The best method is not to hammer in, but to analyze," and then add the amplificative and restrictive clauses, bit by bit, 'scientific' measurements of memory 133 thus: "The best method is of course not to ham- mer in the sentences, but to analyze them and think." Then finally insert the words 'by mere reiteration,' and the sentence is complete, and both better understood and quicker remembered than by a more purely mechanical method.
In conclusion, I must say a word about the con- tributions to our knowledge of memory which have recently come from the laboratory-psychologists. Many of the enthusiasts for scientific or brass-in- strument child-study are taking accurate measure- ments of children's elementary faculties, and among these what we may call immediate memory admits of easy measurement. All we need do is to exhibit to the child a series of letters, syllables, figures, pictures, or what-not, at intervals of one, two, three, or more seconds, or to sound a similar series of names at the same intervals, within his hearing, and then see how completely he can re- produce the list, either directly, or after an inter- val of ten, twenty, or sixty seconds, or some longer space of time. According to the results of this exercise, the pupils may be rated in a memory- scale; and some persons go so far as to think that the teacher should modify her treatment of the 134 TALKS TO TEACHERS child according to the strength or feebleness of its faculty as thus made known.
Now I can only repeat here what I said to you when treating of attention: man is too complex a being for light to be thrown on his real efficiency by measuring any one mental faculty taken apart from its consensus in the working whole. Such an exercise as this, dealing with incoherent and insipid objects, with no logical connection with each other, or practical significance outside of the 'test,' is an exercise the like of which in real life we are hardly ever called upon to perform. In real life, our memory is always used in the ser- vice of some interest: we remember things which we care for or which are associated with things we care for; and the child who stands at the bot- tom of the scale thus experimentally established might, by dint of the strength of his passion for a subject, and in consequence of the logical asso- ciation into which he weaves the actual materials of his experience, be a very effective memorizer indeed, and do his school-tasks on the whole much better than an immediate parrot who might stand at the top of the 'scientifically accurate' list.
This preponderance of interest, of passion, in determining the results of a human being's work- ELEMENTARY DEFECTS NOT FATAL 135 1 1 ing life, obtains throughout. No elementary measurement, capable of being performed in a laboratory, can throw any light on the actual efficiency of the subject; for the vital thing about him, his emotional and moral energy and dogged- ness, can be measured by no single experiment, and becomes known only by the total results in the long rim. A blind man like Huber, with his pas- sion for bees and ants, can observe them through other people's eyes better than these can through their own. A man born with neither arms nor legs, like the late Kavanagh, M. P. — and what an icy heart his mother must have had about him in his babyhood, and how 'negative' would the laboratory-measurements of his motor-functions have been! — can be an adventurous traveller, an equestrian and sportsman, and lead an athletic outdoor life. Mr. Romanes studied the element- ary rate of apperception in a large number of persons by making them read a paragraph as fast as they could take it in, and then immediately write down all they could reproduce of its con- tents. He found astonishing differences in the rapidity, some taking four times as long as others to absorb the paragraph, and the swiftest readers being, as a rule, the best immediate recollectors, 136 TALKS TO TEACHERS