Appleton's Journal, 1880: Memory by A.J Faust
Table of Contents
Elder’s Notes
Memory by A.J Faust
What is this Mysterious Mental Process
Before The Reasoning Powers
Mnemonic Power
Antonio Magliabecchi
Cardinal Mezzofanti
Charles Sumner
Dr. Gregory
Ignatius De Rossi
Richard Porson
Memoriter Training
Reminiscence
Savant Syndrome
Mnemotechny
Diary and Correspondence of Samuel Pepys
Thomas Fuller
Culture of Memory
Pre-existence
Elder’s Notes
I am generally unimpressed with what happening within the mnemonic arts from 1850s-1970s. That said, as far as the field had fallen from prior centuries, there were pockets of extraordinary talent and deep insight during this time. It’s just that the field, as a whole, took several steps back.
Now, this might just be hindsight bias. A lot of terrible mnemonic literature from the 1800s has survived, something that might not be true for the mnemonic frauds and charlatans of the scholastic and early modern era. There’s a reason why Thomas Schenkel was such a tight-ass with his method, vowing his students to secrecy. I’ve written about Loisette before, who basically copied the ideas of Edward Pick and passed them off as his own.
I imagine that Schenkel, when he wasn’t busy evading the inquisition, had to deal with his own fair share of Loisettes.
I’m still in the early phases of my research, so it’s possible that the mnemonists of the 1850-1970 era will win me over in the end, though I have my doubts.
That said!
This essay by A.J Faust is an example of what was good about that era. It’s a bit dated here and there, the author refers to people with savant syndrome as idiots, which was the term at the time.
Overall though, it’s a fantastic piece full of interesting facts, anecdotes, and stories. There’s at least a dozen examples of polymemnones in this essay, including some big names like Leibnit, Euler, and Pascal.
There are several issues that Faust raises that deserve the attention of any serious student of memory.
First, there’s this criticism that’s still common today:
It is a very prevalent opinion among mankind that the cultivation of memory to any extraordinary degree usually weakens the other mental faculties.
I’ve written about this critique before. In The Art of Local Memory, the anonymous authors mention contemporary critics who thought memory undermined judgment, whereas the critics of today instead think that memory undermines creativity.
This argument is tenacious.
I have my own theories as to why this argument refuses to die, even when countless studies (like those cited by Ian Leslie in his book Curious) show that it’s nonsense.
There may be specific cognitive trade-offs to developing certain kinds of expert memory, as the London taxi-driver studies suggest. Those studies examined what happens when professional London cabbies learn an enormous network of routes. The result was not a broad change in their cognitive abilities, but a change in their memory profile: stronger large-scale spatial knowledge was associated with weaker performance on some tasks involving the formation of new anterograde associative memories.
So, sure, you might see trade-offs within related memory systems, as one kind of memory becomes highly prioritized. But there’s no evidence from this research that intensive memory training shrinks the prefrontal cortex, impairs judgment, or undermines capacities like divergent thinking.
The few studies that investigate the neuroscience of memory training show specific benefits with limited transfer beyond memory. Yes, your brain will adapt. No, it won’t be that big a deal.
Another argument I quite liked of Faust is this one:
There is no more common mistake among those who have much to do with the training of the young: Attention, to be sure, is quite requisite; but, after all, it is the impression made by the object of attention, rather than attention itself, which enables us to recall at pleasure what belongs to the past. Our impression of objects is controlled by the condition of the mind itself, and by the condition of circumstances external to it. How many of us can recall certain passages of authors and remember distinctly the time and place in which we first read them? And if we analyze the mental process which enables us to do this, after perhaps the lapse of years, we will surely find that, aside from their striking thought or beauty, there existed some circumstance external to the mind which prepared it to receive impressions as lasting as life itself.
The above ties into my arguments on the role of intention in memory. It’s not enough to pay attention, you need to draw meaning from what you notice. The “impression” made by the object of attention is just another term for the intention it evokes in us. Attention without intention leaves no traces and makes no memories.
There’s also this line that deserves emphasis:
“Artificial aids, however admirable in themselves, can never act as substitutes for practice and attention. Be their usefulness what it may, there is still remaining a large work, which can only be accomplished by the faculty itself unassisted by any mnemonic system.
I know that certain writers on psychology have lavished much praise on such artificial plans, and I have witnessed some exhibitions of their success which, to say the least, were remarkable; but I have never been convinced of their utility for the ordinary concerns of life. In short, they appear rather as sports for the pastime of the intellectual acrobat than as helps for the improvement of the scholar.”
Faust makes the above point just as his essay turns toward the culture of memory.
The art of memory, without a culture of memory, is only a sport. It’s intellectual acrobatics. It’s all sizzle, no steak.
I’m convinced that one of reasons the art of memory has never broken into wider use is that it’s rarely been tied to a well-developed theory of practice.
In order for the art of memory to prosper and grow, it has to be embedded within a larger culture of memory: one that gives people meaningful, tangible reasons to engage in acts of structured recollection.
Memory by A.J Faust
“Thought and her shadowy brood thy call obey, And Place and Time are subject to thy sway !” — Rogers
It is a trite observation that the attention of few persons is awakened by the common- place occurrences in the world around us. Life is full of wonders, but we see them not; and death of mysteries, but we comprehend them not. Whatever is habitual to us in the physical universe loses its power to excite our astonish- ment in proportion to the degree of our familiarity.
That the stars remain fixed in their orbits, and that the rains descend to the earth, are facts which elicited our childish wonderment; but in after-life they have awakened few questionings as to the laws which govern either one phenomenon or the other.
The fall of an apple can set the inquiring spirit of only a Newton on a train of thought out of which is developed the theory of gravitation. If the physical world without us, with its myriad of occult marvels, fail to provoke our admiration, why should the operations of the intellectual world within us, with its more subtile secrets, call forth our wonder or our awe?
“Habit dulls the senses,” says the author of “Ecce Homo,” “and puts the critical faculty to sleep.”
We are more inclined to look at the results of mental phenomena than to analyze the processes by which they are brought about. The fruit of our intellectual life is more pleasing to contemplate than the hidden laws which con- trol its growth. There is an admission of ignorance in the “Scaligerana,” which exhibits a notable honesty in the first scholar of his age. “My father declared,” says Joseph Scaliger, “that of the causes of three things in particular he was wholly ignorant—the interval of fever, of the ebb and flow of the sea, and of reminiscence.”
What Is This Mysterious Mental Process
What is this mysterious mental process, which baffles the investigation of the acutest of men, the effects of whose operations are so common to all, that its habitual play excites no more wonder than the revolution of the seasons; which connects the past with the present, and about which metaphysicians draw subtilest distinctions, as perplexing to the unphilosophic mind as the exercise of the faculty itself?
Earliest developed in the child, soonest impaired in the aged, memory is the harbinger of infantile intelligence, and its failure the approach of second childhood. It meets us alike at the threshold of time and of eternity.
Plato compares it to a tablet on which characters are written; Cicero calls it the thesaurus omnium rerum; Gassendi, precursor of Newton in astronomy and of Locke in philosophy, likens it to folds in a piece of paper; Locke characterizes it as the storehouse of our ideas, and Shakespeare as the warder of the brain. Reid defines memory as an immediate knowledge of the past, thereby distinguishing it from consciousness, an immediate knowledge of the present. This theory is regarded by Sir William Hamilton as self-contradictory. “ To be known immediately,” says he, “an object must be known in itself; to be known in itself, it must be known as actual, now existent, present. But the object of memory is past, not present, not now existent, not actual; it can not therefore be known in itself. If known at all, it must be known in something different from itself—i. e., mediately.”
In the philosophy of Stewart we approximate a definition sufficiently concise for our purpose, and at the same time within the comprehension of the unmetaphysical reader. Memory denotes, according to Stewart, a union of two faculties, implying two distinct things, the one being the complement of the other—” a capacity of retaining knowledge, and a power of recalling it to our thoughts when we have occasion to apply it to use.” Memory, therefore, is the combination of the faculty of acquisition and the faculty of reproduction.
The same laws of mental activity which govern the association of ideas, govern also the faculty by which we are enabled to reproduce them. It is of the operations of reproduction or of reminiscence that Julius Scaliger makes his frank confession of total ignorance. The problem of the excitation of thought escapes the closest scrutiny of mental analysis, and the speculation of ages has yielded no more plausible solution than that underlying the hypothesis of Avicenna, the Arabian philosopher, who advances the theory of the “irradiation of divine light through which the recovered cognition is infused into the intellect.”
The intellectual law that governs the whole phenomena of reminiscence is as impalpable as the law that regulates the phenomena of life itself. Metaphysicians and physicists may reduce them to elemental principles, but beyond these the human ken can not pierce. It is the border-line of the infinite, beyond which no finite vision, however keen, no finite reason, however sagacious, can penetrate.
Before The Reasoning Powers
Memory is developed before the reasoning powers begin to assert themselves, and the wisdom of this provision in our mental economy is seen in the fact that when the higher faculties of the mind come into exercise there is material stored away for their use.
It is often fallaciously supposed that memory depends primarily upon the attention bestowed upon objects brought within its field of vision. This theory is maintained by Helvétius in his treatise “ De l’Esprit”: “C’est l’attention, plus ou moins, qui grave, plus ou moins profondement, les objets dans la mémoire.”
There is no more common mistake among those who have much to do with the training of the young: Attention, to be sure, is quite requisite; but, after all, it is the impression made by the object of attention, rather than attention itself, which enables us to recall at pleasure what belongs to the past. Our impression of objects is controlled by the condition of the mind itself, and by the condition of circumstances external to it. How many of us can recall certain passages of authors and remember distinctly the time and place in which we first read them? And if we analyze the mental process which enables us to do this, after perhaps the lapse of years, we will surely find that, aside from their striking thought or beauty, there existed some circumstance external to the mind which prepared it to receive impressions as lasting as life itself.
Well do I remember my first acquaintance with Goldsmith’s “ Deserted Village,” and Robert Emmet’s speech. They were read to me when a mere lad by an Irish book-peddler, and the patriotic feeling with which he rendered them made an indelible impression. As a boy I had other poems, tales, and perhaps speeches read to me; but my earliest recollection of literature is for ever connected with Goldsmith and Emmet, and their humble interpreter. Some metaphysicians have placed great emphasis on the different kinds of memory, and have attempted to reduce them to a philosophic divi- sion, but this division is in reality one of degree rather than of difference. Constitutional habit and professional training give to memory a large share of its readiness and accuracy. For the sake of convenience, however, we may speak of a philosophic, a pictorial, and a professional memory.
A mind educated to habits of close thought is more interested in general principles than in circumstantial details, in the relations of cause and effect rather than in the inconsequential concomitants of time and place. A memory that can associate facts and truths as illustrative of universal principles is usually denominated a philosophic memory. Bacon and Sir William Hamilton are striking instances of this kind of memory.
Mnemonic Power
De Quincey says, “ The first thing I heard about Sir William Hamilton was, that he might be regarded as the modern Magliabecchi, or even as a better Magliabecchi, if better there could be.” Both had so carefully surveyed the whole field of human philosophy that, when they came to develop a system marked by their own individuality, the association of one truth with another was clearly and indelibly mapped out by memory. Hence it is that the writings of both are repositories, not only of their own thought, but of the thought of the ages.
Pascal and Grotius possessed in a remarkaple degree this philosophic power of memory, and it is asserted that they forgot nothing that they had ever read or thought. Leibnitz and Euler were alike celebrated, and both could repeat the whole of the Æneid of Vergil.
But all men are not interested in the principles of abstract truths, or in the essential relations of genus and species. Their range of mind, either by natural gifts or acquirements of vocation, lies within another province than that of philosophical analysis. Facts and events of themselves chiefly engage their attention, and the details of time and circumstance leave a vivid impression behind. Such men generally possess, in a greater or less degree, what we may call a local or pictorial memory.
The notable instances of mnemonic power, in the history of learning, are especially of this kind, modified in most cases by professional habit and association. It is a very prevalent opinion among mankind that the cultivation of memory to any extraordinary degree usually weakens the other mental faculties. This view is very successfully combated by Sir William Hamilton, who says that:
“ there seems, however, no valid ground for this belief. If an extraordinary power of retention is frequently not accompanied with a corresponding power of intelligence, it is a natural but not a very logical procedure to jump to the conclusion that a great memory is inconsistent with a sound judgment. The opinion is refuted by the slightest induction; for we im- mediately find that many individuals who towered above their fellows in intellectual superiority were almost equally distinguished for the capacity of their memory.”
Antonio Magliabecchi
Antonio Magliabecchi (I633- 1714), the famous Florentine bibliopolist and librarian of Cosmo III, is frequently cited as an example of a wonderful local or pictorial memory, and it is assumed that, as a consequence of the cultivation of one intellectual faculty to the detriment of others, he failed to produce any literary work himself, and that his vast stores of learn-ing were of little service to succeeding times. While Magliabecchi cheerfully aided the scholars of his own age, and many of the most noted were attracted to Florence chiefly to converse with him, this was by no means the only important work which he did for the scholarship of his times. Classical literature is indebted to him for the preservation of many manuscripts in the Laurentian Library of the Medici.
Sprung from the humblest origin, Magliabecchi became, through his love of books, one of the most distinguished of Continental scholars. His name was familiar to men of letters throughout Europe, and so great was the honor in which he was held that literary travelers sought him out before obtaining an interview with the Grand Duke of Tuscany. In Florence he was a far more important personage than the reigning monarch, who was jealous of the attentions bestowed upon him. His memory treasured up not only the results of a prodigious amount of reading, but the very words of authors, and the position of their works on the shelves of libraries.
Two anecdotes are preserved which illustrate his readiness and retentiveness, both of which were often submitted to rigid tests. The Grand Duke, himself no mean scholar, inquired of him if he could procure a copy of a book which had become extremely rare. Magliabecchi replied: “ It is impossible, for there is but one in the world; that is in the Grand Seignior’s library at Constantinople, and is the seventh book on the seventh shelf, on the right hand as you enter.” It may not seem so remarkable that an accomplished librarian should remember the exact shelf and position of a very scarce book; but to recall the ipsissima verba of a manuscript appears almost incredible.
To test the accuracy of his memory, a Florentine gave him a manuscript, prepared for the press, to read. Some time after its return, the author visited him in feigned grief for the loss of his manuscript. Touched by the irretrievable misfortune of his friend, Magliabecchi consoled him by the information that his labor was not in vain, as he could reproduce the whole from memory, and, setting about the task, he soon replaced the first manuscript by a second, in which, it is said, he omitted not a single word.
Cardinal Mezzofanti
In the acquiring of languages no faculty of the mind is so constantly called into requisition as that of memory. Great linguists are always distinguished both for their power of retention and of reproduction. Among the scholars of our own century, Cardinal Mezzofanti is fully a match for Magliabecchi in astonishing feats of mnemonics. Of an equally humble origin with the Florentine librarian, the illustrious linguist gradually rose from one preferment in the Catholic Church to another, till finally he was raised to the cardinalate on the same day with the great palimpsest discoverer, Angelo Mai, and made custodian of the treasures of learning hid from public view in the library of the Vatican.
Like most men who have risen from poverty and obscurity to great eminence, he owed his first success to the encouraging words and kindly offices of a patron. Destined to follow the trade of his father, who was a humble carpenter at Bologna, he had, as is common in Italy, his workbench in the open air, immediateiy under the window of a benevolent Oratorian, Father Respighi. This good old priest instructed a class of young men in Latin and Greek.
Mezzofanti, thirsting for knowledge, soon gave more heed to the instruction in languages than to the work of his trade. That wonderful linguistic aptitude for which he was afterward so noted thus early began to show itself. Without the aid of a book and without a knowledge of the alphabet, he soon acquired, by surreptitiously listening to the instruction of Father Respighi, quite an extensive and accurate acquaintance with the Greek language.
When the Oratorian learned of the marvelous memory of the youthful carpenter, he took him under his tuition in Latin and Greek; and at a later period, when Mezzofanti chose the ecclesiastical state as his vocation, the same instructor prepared him for the episcopal seminary of Bologna. Among the remarkable feats of memory which are related of his early life, it is recorded that he would repeat a folio page of St. Chrysostom in the original, which he had never seen before, after one reading.
Charles Sumner
In a delightful conversation with the lamented Sumner, in which he spoke of the many distinguished statesmen and men of letters whom he had met abroad, I remember very vividly the graphic description which he gave of a red-letter day in his life, of which he had many—a day spent with Lord Macaulay at the charming country-seat of Lord Stanhope, near London. Among other pleasant bits of literary chit-chat about the brilliant essayist and historian,
Mr. Sumner especially remarked upon the iron tenacity of his memory. Macaulay, as it is well known, seems never to have forgotten anything in the domain of literature; and during this visit which the two statesmen made together, Mr. Sumner was impressed with the singular fluency with which the historian quoted strophe after strophe from the choruses of the Greek tragedies. As a classical scholar Sumner himself was not a whit behind his English peer, and indeed I doubt if the one was more remarkable for his memory than the other. I have known instances of Sumner’s verbal accuracy which are as truly astonishing as any parallel cases in the history of literary men. A few years ago, Hon. S. S. Cox, of New York, had prepared a speech on Ku-klux legislation, which was to be delivered without delay in the House of Representatives. He was sorely pressed to find a quotation from Virgil, the substance of which he remembered, yet, as a classical scholar, preferred the exact language of the original. After fruitless en- deavors to catch the words of the Aneid from his colleagues on the floor of the House, he dispatched a page to Sumner, giving him a clew to the needed passage; and the messenger, in a few minutes, returned with a paper upon which were written the lines so eagerly sought:
Gnossius hæc Rhadamanthus habet durissima regna, Castigatque, auditque dolos. --(Æneis, lib. vi, 566, 567.)
Sumner’s memory was not only faithful in treasuring up the lore of antiquity, but it was equally exact in retaining an extensive and scholarly knowledge of the languages and literature of modern Europe. Three years’ residence abroad, before his entrance into public life, afforded him facilities, which he improved, for becoming acquainted with the wide field of Continental learning.
I have heard of an incident which happened at a dinner in Cambridge, at which some of the leading literary spirits of Harvard and Boston were present, when a discussion arose as to the authorship of a few French verses which Longfellow quoted as an example of rhythmical ease and elegance. No one, at the moment, could place them; and Sumner, taking down a volume of Voltaire, at once turned to the passage in the tragedy of “ Mérope.”
Dr. Gregory
Mrs. Somerville, in her “Personal Recollections,” has preserved another signal instance of a great pictorial memory in the person of Dr. Gregory, an eminent physician of Edinburgh, who was as famous for his Ciceronian Latinity as for his professional skill. Mr. Somerville, her husband, who she says was a good Latinist, met in his reading a Latin quotation the source of which he was unable to trace. He applied for information to his friend Dr. Gregory, who remarked, “ It is now forty years since I read that author, but I think you will find the passage in the middle of such a page.” Somerville obtained the book, and found the quotation at the place indicated.
Ignatius De Rossi
By the use of the unmetaphysical term professional memory, I simply mean a memory, philosophic or pictorial, which is modified by the circumstances of the possessor’s pursuit or vocation, and the accidental direction which that pursuit gives to it. To say that one best remembers that with which one is best acquainted, and in which one is most deeply interested, is but to utter a truism patent to all.
Here again memory is one of degree, and not especially one of kind. When Hercules Consalvi, the illustrious prime minister of Pius VII, was attending the Congress of Vienna, which was to decide grave questions affecting the States of the Church, inquiries were frequently made by German scholars, who were presented to him, about Ignatius De Rossi, one of the most erudite of Italians. It is reported that the Cardinal not only felt no little chagrin in not being able to answer, for he really had no knowledge of such a person in Rome, but that one of his first duties on returning to the Eternal City was to seek out the helpless old man whose name was so familiar to the learned world.
As a pensioner of the Papal Government, De Rossi had lodgings in the Roman College, whither Consalvi went to see him. His days of usefulness were over, and he was but a shadow of his former self. Versed in all the wealth of Oriental learning, De Rossi had devoted the earlier years of his life to the preparation of commentaries and dictionaries elucidating every department of recondite thought.
From the Propaganda press in 1807 he sent forth his “Etymologica Aegyptianae,” whose appearance was honored by a special meeting of the Academy of Leipsic, and a letter of congratulation sent to its author. As a mnemonic prodigy, De Rossi has scarcely an- equal, certainly not a rival.
Having been a professor of the classic languages of antiquity, he was perfectly at home in the whole realm of Greek and Roman literature. Canon Lattanzi, his colleague in educational labor, related to the late Cardinal Wiseman an anecdote of De Rossi’s great memory. Spending a little time together in villeggiatura at Tivoli, De Rossi remarked that if any one would repeat a line from any of the four great poets of Italy, he would follow it by reciting a hundred lines in due order of connection. The trial was made, and, to the astonishment of every one, he was entirely successful.
The query was then raised as to his ability to perform the same feat in the Latin classics. “It is twenty years,” he replied, “since I read the Italian poets, and then it was only for amusement; of the Latin classics I have been professor, so you had better not try me.”
De Rossi had prepared a valuable Arabic lexicon, which he would never put to press from a dread of proof-reading, for which he had an unconquerable aversion. Cardinal Wiseman reports him as saying that, “ if the tempter had now to deal with another Job, and wished to make him lose his patience, he would induce him to try his hand at publishing an Oriental work.”
Richard Porson
There is, I presume, no great question cognate with classical literature that Richard Porson, the second Grecian that England ever produced, has not dissected with more or less circumstantiality, according to its degree of importance. Among Continental savants he shares with Valckenaer the honor of being the profoundest Greek scholar since the days of Bentley. I am sometimes inclined to think that the age of great clas- sical scholarship is past, and that the Scaligers, Casaubons, Bentleys, and Porsons belong to a different era of culture than our own.
Modern education having taken a new departure into the regions of experimental philosophy, there are multitudes of sciolists who regard the classical autocrats of former times as men who have mis- directed their powers. Porson’s character presents a strange admixture of incongruities. With vast acquirements in classic studies we naturally associate that seclusion and self-denial which, to accomplish anything in the world of letters, must
“Scorn delights and live laborious days.”
But Porson was one of the most irregular of men. Unmethodic in intellectual work, even to idleness at times, and lawless in habits of life, even to gross drunkenness, he has left as an editor of classical literature a copious storehouse of profound reflections and delicate criticisms. When deepest in his cups, he could discuss with the precision of an Aristarchus the readings of the Greek tragic poets, recite Homer by the hour, and expound such problems as the intricate doctrine of the digamma. There are many curious anecdotes related of him by Rogers, the poet, Basil Montagu, and other of his intimates, and they all speak of his singularly versatile memory. In the “Personal Niemoirs” of Pryse Lockhart Gordon, it is narrated that Porson, having been invited to dine with him on a Friday at his residence in Sloane Street, mistook the day and appeared for dinner on Thursday. Like Saxe’s Familiar—
“ Who comes—but never goes”—
he was not in the least disconcerted by the blunder, nor was he to be put off till the morrow. Remaining for dinner, he exhibited no disposition to go to bed at the usual retiring hour, and, in company with two bottles of wine and an Italian novel, Porson made a night of it, finishing the beverage and the romance by breakfast-time. At dinner next day he gave a translation from memory, and, although there were forty names mentioned in the story, he remembered all of them but one. Exasperated that he could not at once recall the forgotten name, he abstractedly walked the floor for a few minutes, when he shouted, “ Eureka! The Count’s name is Don Francesco Averrani.”
Mr. Cogan, another friend of the eccentric Professor of Greek, says that Porson, happening one day to call on an acquaintance who was considerably mystified over an obscure passage in Thucydides, was consulted as to the meaning of a word. He immediately repeated the passage in which the word occurred, and, being asked how he knew it was the correct one, replied: “ Because the word occurs only twice in Thucydides, once on the right-hand page, in the edition which you are using, and once on the left. I observed on which side you looked, and accordingly knew to which passage you referred.”
Memoriter Training
No class of professional men has exhibited so many examples of the great power of memory as that of actors. Their memoriter training conduces to the strengthening of the faculty to an extraordinary degree.
The history of the stage furnishes an inexhaustible fund of anecdote of the almost incredible feats of memory performed by histrionic genius, from the most gifted tragedian to the most shiftless strolling player.
Cooke could commit to memory the contents of a daily paper in eight hours; and William Lyon, an obscure player of Edinburgh, wagered a bowl of punch that he could repeat next morning the entire contents of the “Daily Advertiser.” He began the task, and completely reproduced that day’s issue of the paper, including not only the news, but all the multitudinous advertisements of a metropolitan journal!
Reminiscence
Memory is so essential for the performance of the ordinary functions of animal life, that even the brute creation and the lowest types of human intelligence are alike endowed with the faculty of recalling the past in a more equal measure than is usually supposed.
Metaphysicians of the older school resolve such exhibitions of reminiscence in the lower order of creation into mere recognitions. Such a theory is certainly at variance with the slightest observation of the habits of domesticated animals, for it presupposes that they have no power to recall an absent object, and can recognize it only when present.
Upon this hypothesis no satisfactory explanation can be adduced for the poignant grief which animals often display when robbed of their offspring, nor for the tricks of the trained dog, horse, or bird, which approximate so closely to human intelligence that we fail to establish a clear line of distinction between the two. The recent inves- tigations of such scientists as Darwin and Douglass Spalding offer another and a more plausible elucidation of the problem of reminiscence.
According to their theory, which has been pronounced materialistic by a writer in the London “Spectator,’ “ the resuscitation of impressions to consciousness depends upon the molecular change in the brain. Reminiscence, therefore, is not exclusively a mental faculty of man, nor of the wise and the learned only, but is possessed in some degree by the whole animal world.
Savant Syndrome
Mrs. Somerville has recorded striking particulars of two Scotch idiots who were wonderfully endowed with the gift of memory. One she met in Edinburgh, the son of a respectable gentleman who took the afflicted creature to the kirk on Sundays.
Upon returning home he would repeat the whole sermon from memory word for word; and this was in days when Scotch sermons were almost treatises on systematic divinity. The other she met while on a tour in the Highlands. So perfectly familiar was he with the Bible, that if you inquired where such and such a text was to be found, he would not only tell you without hesitation, but recite the whole chapter from which it was taken. Mrs. Somerville adds: “The common people of Scotland at that time had a kind of serious compassion for these harmless idiots, because ‘ the hand of God was upon them.’”
Ferdinand Gregorovius, in his “ Wanderjahre in Italien,” speaks of a celebrated Corsican of the sixteenth century, Giulio Guidi, whose memory was so encyclopedic that he was called in Padua Guidi della gran memoria. He is said to have been able to repeat thirty-six thousand names after once hearing them; but Gregorovius mentions this prodigy as an example of a man who had developed one faculty of mind, to the almost total obliteration of all the rest.
Mnemotechny
So important an agent is memory in the intellectual and moral progress of the human race, that men have taxed their ingenuity to devise some system of mnemotechny which might assist the natural memory or lighten it of its burdens. Dr. Grey, Feinaigle, Aimé Paris, and Gouraud have devoted time and skill to the amplification of various plans, but with only a partial success.
Artificial aids, however admirable in themselves, can never act as substitutes for practice and attention. Be their usefulness what it may, there is still remaining a large work, which can only be accomplished by the faculty itself unassisted by any mnemonic system.
I know that certain writers on psychology have lavished much praise on such artificial plans, and I have witnessed some exhibitions of their success which, to say the least, were remarkable; but I have never been convinced of their utility for the ordinary concerns of life. In short, they appear rather as sports for the pastime of the intellectual acrobat than as helps for the improvement of the scholar.
Diary and Correspondence of Samuel Pepys
In the “Diary and Correspondence of Samuel Pepys “ there is an instance of artificial memory whose strength was tested by Lord Clarendon and others by dictating sixty independent words in numerical order to M. Meheux; after a delay of eight minutes he repeated them in the same order backward and forward. Among words given was heautonimoroumenos, which he ob- jected to, not on account of its length, but because it suggested nothing to his mind.
Captain Hatton, who had seen his experiments in France, inquired of M. Meheux “whether his making another trial presently upon a fresh set of words would not entirely efface the memory of the first,” to which he replied, “it would not, if he proposed to himself the remembering of the former.”
Thomas Fuller
Quaint old Thomas Fuller was as famous for his memory as for his puns and quibbles. Pepys bears testimony to the strength of the former, while he often enjoyed the humor of the latter.
Going from Temple Bar to the end of Cheapside, this jocular divine could tell, on his return, every sign on either side of the way, in the order in which they stood. Underlying his facetious style, in “Rules for improving the Memory,” there is a practical philosophy which can not be amended. Want of space forbids giving the whole passage:
“First, soundly infix in thy mind what thou desirest to remember. What wonder is it if agitation of business jog that out of thy head which was there rather tacked than fastened? It is best knocking in the nail overnight, and clinching it the next morning. Overburden not thy memory to make so faithful a servant a slave. Remember Atlas was weary. Have as much reason as a camel, to rise when thou hast thy full load. Memory, like a purse, if it be overfull that it can not shut, all will drop out of it: take heed of a gluttonous curiosity to feed on many things, lest the greediness of the appetite of thy memory spoil the digestion thereof. Marshal thy notions into a handsome method. One will carry twice more weight trussed and packed up in bundles, than when it lies untoward flapping and hanging about his shoulders. Things orderly fardled up under heads are most portable.”
Culture of Memory
It is not my purpose to enumerate the advantages to be derived from a right culture of the memory, but I can not forbear alluding to one which is intimately connected with its improvement.
Youth is the proper season to begin the training, not of one, but of all the mental faculties; and the education of the head, like the education of the heart, continues as long as life shall last. There is nothing which so invigorates the memory as the habit of committing passages from favorite authors.
If we are careful in our selections, they are serviceable to us, and may become, as Ruskin says,
“nests on the sea indeed, but safe beyond all others; … fairy palaces of beautiful thoughts, bright fancies, satisfied memories, noble histories, faithful sayings, treasure-houses of precious and restful thoughts which care can not disturb, nor pain make gloomy, nor, poverty take away from us-houses built without hands, for our souls to dwell in.”
I can cite no greater example of the incompara ble benefits of thus educating the memory than that of Milton, who turned with sightless eyes to the composition of “Paradise Lost.”
Mr. Hallam has beautifully and instructively pictured this period in the blind poet’s life:
“Then the remembrance of early reading came over his dark and lonely path like the moon emerging from the clouds. Then it was that the Muse was truly his; not only as she poured her creative inspiration into his mind, but as the daughter of Memory, coming with fragments of ancient melodies, the voice of Euripides, and Homer, and Tasso; sounds that he had loved in youth, and treasured up for the solace of his age. They who, though not enduring the calamity of Milton, have known what it is, when afar from books, in solitude, or in traveling, or in the intervals of worldly care, to feed on poetical recollections, to murmur over the beautiful lines whose cadence has long delighted their ear, to recall the sentiments and images which retain by association the charm that early years once gave them-they will feel the inestimable value of committing to the memory, in the prime of its power, what it will easily receive and indelibly retain. I know not, indeed, whether an education that deals much with poetry, such as is still usual in England, has any pleasures at the other extreme of life.”
Pre-existence
There is a phenomenon of the past so mysteriously connected with memory, that no intelligent explanation of it has ever been attempted. I refer to the vague feeling of pre-existence which has assumed with some a certitude of belief. It has variously found expression in our literature, and a writer in the London “Practitioner” believes it to be an evidence of an overworked condition of the brain, and not unfrequently the fore- runner of incipient epilepsy.
Some years ago I was intimately associated with a cultivated Irish gentleman who often referred to this curious sensation—this echo, as it were, of a long-for-gotten past-which he experienced at intervals. He was a man of rare gifts, and superior to any- thing like vulgar superstition. The fact is at least noteworthy that fifteen years after my first acquaintance with him I heard of his death from epilepsy of a violent form.
A kinsman of ours, now a septuagenarian, visited Aix-la-Chapelle in early life, and he maintains to this day that its streets and cathedral containing the tomb of Charlemagne, which he saw for the first time, were as familiar to him as though he had resided there for a long period. He jocularly explains the fact on the hypothesis that memory was making note of a preexistent state of being when he must have been a denizen of that city. Coleridge and Tennyson, Dickens and Rossetti, have been subject to the delusion, if it may be called such. In an exquisite sonnet, commemorative of the birth of his son Hartley, Coleridge says:
“Oft o’er my brain does that strange fancy roll hich makes the present (while the flash doth last) seem a mere semblance of some unknown past, Mixed with such feelings as perplex the soul Self-questioned in her sleep; and some have said We lived ere yet this robe of flesh we wore.”
Rossetti suggests, in a beautiful poem entitled “Sudden Light,” a continuity of being both in a preexistent and in a future state:
I have been here before,
But when or how I can not tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet, keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore,
You have been mine before
How long ago I may not know:
But just when at that swallow’s soar
Your neck turned so,
Some veil did fall-I knew it all of yore.
Then, now-perchance again!
O round mine eyes your tresses shake!
Shall we not lie as we have lain
Thus for Love’s sake,
And sleep, and wake, yet never break the chain?”Equally clear is the sentiment of Dickens in “David Copperfield,” who makes it as universal among mankind as that of any of the sensations with which the science of psychology is acquainted:
“ We have all some experience of a feeling which comes over us occasionally of what we are saying and doing having been said or done before, in a remote time-of our having been surrounded dim ages ago by the same faces, objects, and circumstances—of our knowing perfectly well what will be said next, as if we sud- denly remembered it.”
Tennyson, always delicate, subtile, and full of pathos, but dimly foreshadows, in “The Two Voices,” this phenomenon, which in his verse lies in close proximity to the realm of the supernatural:
Moreover, something is or seems,
That touches me with mystic gleams,
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams—
Of something felt, like something here;
Of something done, I know not where ;
Such as no language may declare."Among our own writers, Whittier has made the problem of pre-existence the burden of a beautiful poem, quite aptly called “ A Mystery.” Like a finely chiseled piece of sculpture, it must be seen entire to appreciate the deftly arranged sequence of incidents subordinated to the chief thought uppermost in the creation of the artist. To quote a disconnected stanza or two would be but the conversion of a perfect antique into a torso:
The river, hemmed with leaning trees,
Wound through its meadows green;
A low, blue line of mountains showed
The open pines between.
One sharp, tall peak above them all
Clear into sunlight sprang.
I saw the river of my dreams,
The mountains that I sang.
No clew of memory led me on,
But well the way I knew;
A feeling of familiar things
With every footstep grew.
Not otherwise above its crag
Could hang the blasted pine;
Not otherwise the maple hold
Aloft its red ensign.
So up the long and shorn foot-hills
The mountain-road should creep;
So, green and low, the meadow fold
Its red-haired kine asleep.
The river wound as it should wind,
Their place the mountains took;
The white, torn figure of their clouds
Wore no unwonted look.
Yet ne'er before that river's rim
Was pressed by feet of mine;
Never before mine eyes had crossed
That broken mountain-line.
A presence, strange at once and known,
Walked with me as my guide;
The skirts of some forgotten life
Trailed noiseless at my side.
Was it a dim-remembered dream?
Or glimpse through ons old?
The secret which the mountains kept
The river never told.
But from the vision, ere it passed,
A tender hope I drew ;
And, pleasant as a dawn of spring,
The thought within me grew—
That love would temper every change
And soften all surprise,
And, misty with the dreams of earth,
The hills of heaven rise.