(Psychology) The Principles of

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.It must be a difference in the mode of feeling the image which leads me to such different conclusions in the two cases.When I remember that I did wind it, I feel it grown together with its associates of past date and place.When I remember that I did not, it keeps aloof; the associates fuse with each other, but not with it.This sense of fusion, of the belonging together of things, is a most subtle relation; the sense of non-fusion is an equally subtle one.Both relations demand most complex mental processes to know them, processes quite different from that mere presence or absence of an image which does such service in the cruder books.[11] Psychologia Empirica, § 174.[12] Analysis, I.330-1.Mill believed that the various things remembered, the self included, enter consciousness in the form of separate ideas, but so rapidly that they are 'all clustered into one.'"Ideas called up in close conjunction.assume, even when there is the greatest complexity, the appearance, not of many ideas, but of one" (vol.I.p.123).This mythology does not impair the accuracy of his description of memory's object.[13] Compare, however, p.251, Chapter IX.[14] Professor Bain adds, in a note to this passage of Mill's: "This process seems best expressed by laying down a law of Compound or Composite Association, under which a plurality of feeble links of connection may be a substitute for one powerful and self-sufficing link."Get any book for free on: www.Abika.comTHE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY450[15] Analysis, chap.X.[16] H.Maudsley, The Physiology of Mind (London, 1876), p.513.[17] The only fact which might plausibly be alleged against this view is the familiar one that we may feel the lapse of time in an experience so monotonous that its earlier portions can have no'associates' different from its later ones.Sit with closed eyes, for example, and steadily pronounce some vowel-sound, thus, a-- a-- a-- a-- a--.thinking only of the sound.Nothing changes during the time occupied by the experiment, and yet at the end of it you know that its beginning was far away.I think, however, that a close attention to what happens during this experiment shows that it does not violate in the least the conditions of recall laid down in the text; and that if the moment to which we mentally hark back lie many seconds behind the present instant, it always has different associates by which we define its date.Thus it was when I had just breathed out, or in; or it was the 'first moment' of the performance, the one 'preceded by silence;' or it was 'one very close to that;' or it was 'one when we were looking forward instead of back, its now;' or it is simply represented by a number and conceived symbolically with no definite image of its date.It seems to me that I have no really intuitive discrimination of the different past moments after the experience has gone on some little time, but that back of the'specious present' they all fuse into a single conception of the kind of thing that has been going on, with a more or less clear sense of the total time it has lasted, this latter being based on an automatic counting of the successive pulses of thought by which the process is from moment to moment recognized as being always the same.Within the few seconds which constitute the specious present there is an intuitive perception of the successive moments.But these moments, of which we have a primary memory-image, are not properly recalled from the past, our knowledge of them is in no way analogous to a memory properly so called.Cf.supra, p.646.[18] On Intelligence, I.258-9.[19] Not that mere native tenacity will make a man great.It must be coupled with great passions and great intellect besides.Imbeciles sometimes have extraordinary desultory memory.Drobisch describes (Empirische Psychol., p.95) the case of a young man whom he examined.He had with difficulty been taught to read and speak."But if two or three minutes were allowed him to peruse an octave page, he then could spell the single words out from his memory as well as if the book lay open before him.That there was no deception I could test by means of a new Latin law-dissertation which had just come into my hands, which he never could have seen, and of which both subject and language were unknown to him.He read off [mentally] many lines, skipping about too, of the page which had been given him to see, no worse than if the experiment had been made with a child's story." Drobisch describes this case as if it were one of unusual persistence in the visual image ['primary memory,' vide supra, p.643].But he adds that the youth'remembered his pages a long time.' In the Journal of Speculative Philosophy for Jan.1871 (VI.6) is an account by Mr.W.D Henkle (together with the stock classic examples of preternatural memory) of an almost blind Pennsylvania farmer who could remember the day of the week on which any date had fallen for forty-two years past, and also the kind of weather it was, and what he was doing on each of more than fifteen thousand days.Pity that such a magnificent faculty as this could not have found more worthy application!Get any book for free on: www.Abika.comTHE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY451What these cases show is that the mere organic retentiveness of a man need bear no definite relation to his other mental powers.Men of the highest general powers will often forget nothing, however insignificant.One of the most generally accomplished men I know has a memory of this sort.He never keeps written note of anything, yet is never at a loss for a fact which he has once heard.He remembers the old addresses of all his New York friends, living in numbered streets, addresses which they themselves have long since moved away from and forgotten [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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