Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/796

776 that little. Let any man try to write his autobiography, say between the ages of five and six, and he will find that he has exhausted everything he can recollect of that period in a very few pages. Let him meet, for the first time after very many years, with some friend of his boyhood, and talk over some interesting event in which they were both engaged, and of which his recollection is so vivid that he believes he can have forgotten none of its incidents. He will assuredly find, if his experience at all resembles my own, that he and his friend have retained very different versions of the same occurrence, that in each case persons who had played an important part in it had wholly dropped from the memory, and that the conversation will have recalled many facts to both the speakers, that had almost passed into oblivion. We recollect the memories of incidents, or the memories of those memories, rather than the incidents themselves; and the original impression, like the original anecdote in the well-known game of "Russian scandal," receives successive modifications at each step until it is strangely condensed and transformed.

I divided such part of the 279 different ideas as admitted of it into groups, according to the period of my life when the association that linked the idea to the word was first formed, and found that almost exactly the half of those that recurred either twice, thrice, or four times, dated back to the period when I had not yet left college, at the age of twenty-two. Of those that did not recur in any of the trials the proportion that dated previously to the age of twenty-two to those of later date was a little smaller, viz., as three to four. All this points to the importance of an early education that shall store the mind with varied imagery, and may form just one half the basis of the thoughts in afterlife.

The 279 different ideas fell into three groups. Those in the first and most numerous were characterized by a vague sense of acting a part. They might be compared to theatrical representations in which the actors were parts of myself, and of which I also was a spectator. Thus the word "a blow" brought up the image of a mental puppet, a part of my own self, who delivered a blow, and the image of another who received one; this was accompanied by an animus on my part to strike, and of a nascent muscular sense of giving a blow. I do not say that these images and sensations were vivid or defined—on the contrary, they were very faint and imperfect; indeed, the imperfection of mental images is almost necessary to mobility of thought, because the portions of them that are not in mental view or even in mental focus at the same instant admit of being changed to new shapes, and so the mental imagery shifts with less abruptness than it would otherwise do. The effect partakes more of the character of the changes in a diorama and less of that of a sudden transformation scene. I am not aware that this very common sort of ideas has ever been christened or even so clearly recognized before as I think it deserves to be; therefore I will