Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/622

604 stand each for an entire word, and it takes thousands of them to make up a language; alphabetical letters stand each, not for a word, but for an elementary sound or component of a word, and twenty-six of them do (very badly, it is true) for all the needs of our mother English. Just so, each cell or fiber in the brain does not stand for a particular word or a particular idea, but for some element of sensation or memory or feeling that goes to make up the special word or idea in question. Horse is made up of five letters, or of four phonetic sounds; it is made up also of a certain form and size and color and mode of motion; and when we speak of it all these elements are more or less vaguely present to our consciousness, coalescing into a sort of indefinite picture, and calling up one another more or less symbolically.

This theory at first sight seems to make the explanation of memory far more difficult and abstruse than formerly. For on the old hypothesis (never perhaps fully pushed to its extreme in realizable thought by any sensible person) it seemed easy enough to say that every act of perception and every fact learned was the establishment of a line of communication between two or more distinct cells or ganglia in the brain, and that the communication, once fairly established, persisted pretty constantly ever afterward. I am told "Shakespeare was born at Stratford-on-Avon"; and forthwith, cell Shakespeare (or Shakspere, or Shakspear, etc.) has a line run from it to cell birth and cell Stratford on-Avon (a pretty complex one indeed, this last), which line remains from that day forward permeable to any similar exercise of nervous energy. This method is undeniably simple, neat, and effective. But, setting aside the difficulty of realizing that any one tract of the brain can possibly hold our whole vast mental picture of Shakespeare or of Stratford-on-Avon (especially if we have ever read the one or visited the other), there is the grotesque difficulty of the innumerable lines and cross-connections of association. A central telephone station would be the merest child's-play to it. For even so simple a word and idea as gooseberry is capable of arousing an infinite number of ideas and emotions. It may lead us at once to the old garden in the home of our childhood, or to the gooseberry-fool we ate yesterday; it may suggest the notion of playing gooseberry, or the big gooseberry of the newspaper paragraph; it may lead to etymological dissertation on its derivation from gooseberry, allied to north country grosers and French groseille, or it may summon up visions of bad champagne, incidentally leading to "The Vicar of Wakefield," and the famous wine manufactured only by Mrs. Primrose. In fact, I have no hesitation at all in expressing my private opinion that, if the chart of the brain were at all like what most people imagine it to be, the associations of the word gooseberry alone would suffice to give good and solid employment to every fiber, cell, and convolution it anywhere possesses.

On the other hand, if we regard the brain as mainly dynamical, as