Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/790

770 these are talkers of to-day or yesterday. Good talkers no doubt there are even in the younger generation, but in comparison with the number of scholars of the day the number of good talkers is pitifully small. What men know they have acquired for the most part through the eye, and such knowledge is not in form to be brought out readily through the mouth. This is a generation of readers, writers, thinkers, experimenters, inventors, but not of talkers. Under our present conditions of life we may expect conversational power to decline still more than it has done.

In conclusion, it may be asked what the effect of our eye-mindedness is and will be upon the memory. Psychologists no longer speak so much of the memory as the memories. With the greater use of the eye, the eye-memory will gain; with the lesser use of the ear the ear-memory will lose. Practically, however, our present mental habits are destructive of our retentive powers generally. To the vast number of visual impressions made upon the mind daily, it is impossible to apply the two principal conditions of good memory—attention and repetition. Newspaper reading may be taken as a good illustration of our memory-destroying habits. In a half-hour devoted to "glancing over" a bulky newspaper, many thousand visual impressions may be received. To the sensations themselves we pay no attention, and usually but little to the words or to the thoughts represented. The matter we read is not worth careful attention nor any repetition. We retain little or none of it and do not care to. An item that we may wish to retain for future use is perhaps cut out and pasted in a scrap-book, and, lest we fail even to remember where it is, our scrap-book has an index. The eye-educated man is found to be well posted in a subject, provided he has a day's notice in which to "cram" from his note-books and library. Nothing suffers so much by disuse as memory. The memory age is past. The merchant has found a better way of keeping his accounts than in his head. Everywhere a man's necessary knowledge far surpasses his retentive capacity. Some will say that this is merely an incidental change in the direction of our mental activity due to our changed conditions of life, and indeed an economical change. Any real deterioration of memory, however, would be a loss of mental symmetry for which there could be no compensation.

In our present enthusiastic devotion to the eye it is not alone the symmetry of the mind that is threatened nor the voice arts alone that will suffer. It may be that we are neglecting that which is in itself one of the richest sources of good. It has not yet been shown that the world of form is more worthy of our cultivation than the world of sound. "There is something as yet unanalyzed about sound," says Mr. Haweis, "which doubles and intensifies at all points the sense of living: when we hear we are