central dates and events to which they naturally attach. Geographical names,
places or other information should be connected with related material already in
the mind. Scientific knowledge should form a coherent and related whole. In
short, everything that is given over to the memory for its keeping should be
linked as closely as possible to material of the same sort. This is all to say that
we should not expect our memory to retain and reproduce isolated, unrelated
facts, but should give it the advantage of as many logical and well grounded
associations as possible.
Recognition.—A fact reproduced by memory but not recognized as belonging to
our past experience would impress us as a new fact. This would mean that
memory would fail to link the present to the past. Often we are puzzled to know
whether we have before met a certain person, or on a former occasion told a
certain story, or previously experienced a certain present state of mind which
seems half familiar. Such baffling mental states are usually but instances of
partial and incomplete recognition. Recognition no longer applies to much of our
knowledge; for example, we say we remember that four times six is twenty-four,
but probably none of us can recall when and where we learned this fact—we
cannot recognize it as belonging to our past experience. So with ten thousand
other things, which we know rather than remember in the strict sense.
3. THE STUFF OF MEMORY
What are the forms in which memory presents the past to us? What are the
elements with which it deals? What is the stuff of which it consists?
Images as the Material of Memory.—In the light of our discussion upon
mental imagery, and with the aid of a little introspection, the answer is easy. I
ask you to remember your home, and at once a visual image of the familiar
house, with its well-known rooms and their characteristic furnishings, comes to
your mind. I ask you to remember the last concert you attended, or the chorus of
birds you heard recently in the woods; and there comes a flood of images, partly
visual, but largely auditory, from the melodies you heard. Or I ask you to
remember the feast of which you partook yesterday, and gustatory and olfactory
images are prominent among the others which appear. And so I might keep on
until I had covered the whole range of your memory; and, whether I ask you for
the simple trivial experiences of your past, for the tragic or crucial experiences,
or for the most abstruse and abstract facts which you know and can recall, the
case is the same: much of what memory presents to you comes in the form of