Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/375

Rh to do this it must suffer change. There may be a few exceptions, as I have mentioned; isolated cases may be artificially kept in being; but these cases are few or the strain on the memory would be too great. One need not have studied experimental psychology to know what a strain it is to remember any disconnected matter: nonsense- syllables, figures, words strung together without rhyme or reason: everyone has some time or other tried to remember such strings of words by weaving them into a story or embedding them in mnemonic verses.

It is a constant tendency of man, therefore, to invest with meaning the meaningless, if for some reason or other it has to be remembered. We shall realise the strength of that tendency when we consider the volumes and volumes that have been devoted merely to the clearing up of obscure, but precious texts.

The history of arts reports similar occurrences. Everyone will be able to think of instances. I will just give one. The Buddhist mound or stupa was a dome surmounted by a staff bearing parasols. On coins it is represented by a half-circle with a vertical line on the top for the staff; but this line has been prolonged through the half-circle, and the whole has been mistaken for a bow and arrow.

The amount of imagination required to invest with a new meaning a story that has become meaningless varies greatly. It is never wholly absent, for in listening to any one we are hard at work thinking all the time and constructing a mental picture from the hints he conveys to us; for we never in speaking exhaust all the details; that were impossible and unnecessary, but we merely indicate the essentials and the hearer does the rest. Even in the case I have quoted from my own experience, my misunderstanding of the Legend of the Flying Chief, there was some sort of reasoning. I had to interpret the expression "talking with the dead," and in order to do so naturally drew on