The earliest form of library was, it is to be supposed, the memory library. This term is not fanciful and does not in any sense attempt figuratively to identify the human memory as such with the library. A few years ago this could have been done in an interesting way because a favorite analogy for conceiving the human brain was the system of pigeon-holes with different sorts of ideas classified and put away in their respective compartments furnishing a very exact analogy to a classified library. This analogy is now found less useful than terms of brain paths or other figures, although the actual geometrical location of each word in brain tissue in the case of memory is still not excluded and this possibility must have its bearing on the psychological study of memory libraries.

What is meant here by the memory library refers to the modern psychological study of inward speech and inward handwriting. This accounts for the existence of inward books and collections of books, and a collection of inward books is obviously a real library. It makes little difference where or how these are kept in the brain. They doubtless imply a library economy at least as different from that of printed and bound books as the books themselves are different from papyrus rolls, clay tablets, or phonographic records, but it is a real collection of books and the psychological study of the place and manner of their housing and the method of their arrangement and prompt service to the owner for his use is not a matter of analogy or figure of speech.

The essence of the book is a fixed form of words. The point is that a certain form of words worked into a unity is preserved in exactly that form. The author looks at it as a whole, prunes, corrects, substitutes better words for inferior ones, and generally works over it as a man works over a painting or statue. At the end of the process when the book is finished it is a fixed form of words, a new creation, an individuality. The ordinary habit of thought and conversation does not reach this point of fixed forms of words although in the case of very retentive memories, where the complete verbal form of conversation is remembered, it approaches it. In general men seldom remember the exact phraseology when they listen to a sermon or a story. On the other hand, however, the actor or the professional story teller can summon at will the exact verbal form of a great number of works and each of these works is properly a book. This permanent fixing of form undoubtedly implies some substance in which the words are recorded, but if that substance is the human brain the result is no less a book, a real record in the real substance, than if recorded in outward substance such as stone or ink.

The practice of keeping such inward records of exact fixed forms of words is not only the oldest form of record keeping and one extensively practised in illiterate periods, but it is commonly practised in modern life by orators who speak without notes, and as a method for the teaching of children before they learn to read (“memorizing”) as well as afterwards in the schools.

Among savage peoples the medicine man is often a library of tribal tradition although the modern ethnologists agree that he was by no means the only professional repository of tribal records. The ancient Mexicans, for example, seem to have had special secular chroniclers whose business it was to memorize public events, and to be a sort of walking public records office, memorizing public accounts of all sorts as well as the story of events. According to many critics of the Old Testament this primitive method continued the chief or only method of transmitting records in Palestine for 2000 years after it had given place to writing in Egypt and Babylonia. They hold that the Pentateuch was formed and transmitted by such oral verbal tradition. The Vedic books were, it used to be alleged, gathered and handed down by a rigorous organized system of memorizing, and this has a certain counterpart in modern times in that memorizing of the Confucian books and of the Koran which forms a chief part of the system of education in the respective cases. The strictness with which this method of transmission of memory books has been carried out to the point of fixing every word and even letter is perhaps best illustrated from the Jewish oral tradition as to the sounds of the vowels which apparently continued oral for centuries before they were represented by the vowel point signs.

Whether blind Homer composed his songs and recited them throughout Greece without reducing to writing or not, he might have done so and would have done as many another before him in doing so. As a matter of fact the excavations of the last dozen years show pretty clearly a pre-Homeric Greek writing, and Homer himself indeed once refers to the written tablet. But however that may be, the race of minstrels began long before Homer and still exists. In the Middle Ages they were each a walking library, often with a very large repertory, and the same is often true to-day among their successors the actors, reciters and the lecturers. The learning of poems and declamations by school children often results in an inward collection of definite verbal forms in considerable numbers. A more complex form of memory library is that of certain ancients who are alleged to have organized their slaves into a system, each of the slaves being assigned a certain number of works in a certain class to learn by heart and kept ready on call to recite when any one of these should be desired.

These inward or memory libraries may be distinguished into two chief kinds. As a matter of fact there are almost as many different kinds of inward books as there are outward books, but as the two chief ways of expression are voice and gesture, so the records of oral speech and gesture language, received by eye, ear, or touch, and inwardly recorded, are the chief kinds of memory books. These are quite distinct as to their processes of reception and record, and very possibly occupy different areas of the brain. These differences may in part be realized from common observation, but one must take pains to guard against the assumption that the inward record is a photograph. It is entirely possible that the brain record of the sound “man” differs as much from a picture of a man as the thread of a phonographic record does. The same is true as to the inward record of a picture word or alphabetical handwritten word. The inward record may no more be a microscopic picture than the stenographic sign is. Nevertheless it is not hard to realize that there is somehow within a series of recorded impressions which may be called images, some of which recall sounds and others objects or gestures. The inward language may or may not have to do with sounds. Modern pantomime and the sign language of deaf-mutes and Indians are languages, and it is entirely possible to store in one’s mind an exact series of signs telling a story in gesture language, just as it is possible to store the symbols for sounds or oral speech.

One of the most interesting chapters in the antiquities of ancient nations and of modern savage tribes is the story of liturgical rites, sacred dances, symbolic processions, and the like. Savage dances e.g. sometimes rehearse events of the hunt or war or domestic scenes. In many of these cases what may be called historic events are represented and the whole ceremony is a rehearsal of these events, although wholly in gesture expression, with gesture or object symbols and without speech. It is the recital of visually memorized records in visual symbols, but the records are just as truly definite accounts of events, or records, or books if you like, as if they were oral words remembered and expressed by voice or in writing. In religious dances and dramatic religious ceremonies, the traditional representations were of ideas rather than events—the nature of the world and man, the future world and the means of attaining this,—and these formed groups and sequences of transmitted ideas quite as definite to the initiated as if expressed orally or in writing.

In the ceremonial processions of the Egyptians and in the Greek mysteries, these representations often become very elaborate and were, apparently, in the secret mysteries, often accompanied by oral explanations by the exegete. It is possible that in the case of both Greek and Egyptian mysteries the transmission had even ceased to be exclusive memory transmission, and that written records, or at least mnemonic tokens of some elaborateness, were preserved in the various chests or baskets carried in the ceremonies. However that may be, these were at least the more elaborate historical successors of symbolic dances and other ceremonies, transmitted among primitive men through visual and muscular sense memory, just as poems were preserved in auditory images and transmitted by oral utterance.

The significant point is that whether the ritual used in the mysteries was transmitted in auditory or visual images, and whether these symbols were external and kept in the basket or chest, which was carried about in the procession, or merely kept in memory, they were, so far as they were separate, complete and stable image-forms, real words, books, and libraries.