Memory and Imagination

Inventors seem to treasure up in their minds, what they have found out, after another manner than those do the same things, who have not this inventive faculty. The former, when they have occasion to produce their knowledge, are in some measure obliged immediately to investigate part of what they want. For this they are not equally fit at all times; so it has often happened, that such as retain things chiefly by means of a very strong memory, have appeared off hand more expert than the discoverers themselves.—Henry Pemberton

§ 38. Recognition.—The working of the associative tendencies in the brain guarantees the revival of past experiences; it does not, so far as we have described it, guarantee that we remember. For memory, in the psychological sense, implies recognition; the remembered experience is not only revived, but is also familiar, comes to us as a bit of our own past history. We must try to find out what this familiarity is.

Suppose that you are entering a street-car. As you enter, you run your eyes over the line of faces before you. The first half-dozen of your fellow-passengers are strangers; their faces arouse no interest and do not arrest your gaze. At the end of the car, however, you see a friend whom you have not met, perhaps, for some time; you recognise him. Your indifference is suddenly gone; you call him by name, take a seat at his side, and begin to talk with him. What has happened?

Something has happened that, if you analyse it, recalls the first of the three connective patterns discussed on p. 161. The visual perception of your friend is supplemented by a verbal idea, his name. Along with the name comes a peculiar sense-feeling, a feeling that you may characterise as a glow of warmth, a feeling of intimacy, a feeling of sociable ease, of relaxation from the formal manner that you wear with strangers. And hardly has the feeling formed when ideas of sorts begin to crowd upon you, and the conversation starts. All this complexity of mental connection is there, and the whole experience may be called a recognition; but we cannot, of course, accept it at its face-value; we must still ask how much of it is essential, and whether one or more of the three factors—name, feeling, ideas—may be left out while recognition remains.

Experiment shows that the one thing necessary to recognition is the feeling of familiarity. In some cases the incoming ideas, and more especially the direct verbal supplement of the perception, the name, seem to be integral factors in the experience; but recognition is possible in their absence; and, what is more, recognition may fail in their presence; a perception may call up ideas that are objectively correct, and yet there may be no recognition of the thing perceived. Recognition, then, is essentially a feeling, a sense-feeling of the agreeable and relaxing type, diffusively organic in its sensory character; any perception or idea to which this feeling attaches is, by that very fact, the perception or idea of something recognised. That is as far as analysis can take us. If we care to go further, and speculate, we may venture to guess that the feeling of familiarity is a weakened survival of the emotion of relief, of fear unfulfilled. There is a distinct touch of pleasurable relief, of the letting-down of strain, in the feeling as we have it; and the derivation is therefore psychologically reasonable. Moreover, primitive man was so defenceless an animal that the strange must always have been cause for anxiety; language, indeed, bears witness on the point; for ‘fear’ is, etymologically, the state of mind of the traveller, the ‘farer’ away from home; and ‘hostis,’ which we translate enemy, originally meant simply stranger. The bodily and mental attitude which expresses recognition thus seems to be still the attitude of going off guard, of ease and confidence. In our everyday life, as you will readily see, the tinge of sense-feeling may be overlaid by the heavier colours of some positive emotion; we may recognise an acquaintance with whom we are heartily angry, or whose conduct has brought us sorrow; primitive man himself recognised his enemies! But in the laboratory, where these disturbing influences are ruled out, the nature of the feeling of familiarity comes clearly to light; intrinsically, recognition is always an agreeable and relaxing experience.

In everyday life, again, our recognitions may be of all degrees of definiteness. They are indefinite when the feeling of familiarity comes up alone, without the name or the associated ideas; when, for instance, we pass someone on the street, and say to our companion “I’m sure I know that face!” and so pass on. They are somewhat more definite when the perception is supplemented by a general name. As we glance down the line of strangers in the street-car we may think to ourselves “doctor,—farmer,—commercial traveller—soldier”; the feeling of familiarity then represents our recognition of the class. Lastly, they are definite when one or more of the contributory factors—the name, the organic stir of the feeling, the incoming ideas—carry an unequivocal reference to our past experience, mean some definite incident of our past life. We chance to overhear a name in conversation; and “Why,” we break in, “that’s the man I went up the Gross Glockner with in ‘98!”—the recognition is definite. There is no real psychological difference between the three cases; the difference lies only in the range of meaning which the contextual processes carry.

There is a psychological difference, however, between all the cases of recognition which we have hitherto mentioned and certain other cases: a difference between direct and indirect recognition. The recognition is direct when the perception at once, of itself, calls up the recognitive feeling. It is indirect when the feeling attaches, not directly to the perception, but to some idea or some other perception connected with the given perception. We pass a stranger on the street; but we are suddenly hailed by a familiar voice; the recognition of the voice makes us look hard at the stranger’s face, and we then recognise him as an old college friend. We try to find our host’s face in a group-photograph of schoolboys, and we are wholly puzzled to identify him; the face is pointed out in the picture, and we turn from it to the mature face with which we are familiar; the photograph grows more and more like, the more closely we compare the two; presently we get a sudden conviction of their identity, the recognition of the photograph is complete, and we wonder that we could have failed to pick the right boy at the outset. In both these instances, recognition hinges on the feeling of familiarity; but something else happens, something that reminds us of the second connective pattern of p. 161, where an idea is read into a perception, or the perception resolved into an idea. There are times, too, when recognition is halting and partial, when the feeling of familiarity alternates with a feeling of strangeness; in such experiences the play of associative tendencies may be extremely complex.

§ 39. Direct Apprehension.—We saw on p. 120 that meaning, which was at first a fringe of mental processes, a contextual setting of some bit of bare experience, may in course of time be carried by nerve-processes which have no mental correlates of any kind. The same thing seems to hold of recognition. We do not, in strictness, ‘recognise’ the clothes that we put on every morning, or the desk at which we are accustomed to write; we apprehend them, directly, as our clothes and our desk; we take them for granted. The feeling of familiarity, the feeling of being at home with our own things, changes first to something that is still a feeling, though weaker and more nebulous; to something that we may describe as an ‘of-course’ feeling, which is still some distance away from sheer indifference. As the days and weeks go on, this of-course feeling itself dies out; the stimuli no longer have power to arouse a feeling at all, and the organism faces the habitual situations without any organic stir. We apprehend the clothes and desk as ours, precisely as we perceive the tree and the piano as spatial (p. 115). In experiments on the recognition of greys, the author has reported positively that a particular grey had been seen before, without being able to find anything whatsoever, in the way of verbal idea or kinÆsthetic quiver or organic thrill, that might carry the meaning of familiarity; the brain-habit just touched off the report ‘Yes,’ and that was all that could be said.

That brain-habit, however, had a psychological history behind it; and the history shows itself whenever our direct apprehension is in some manner disturbed or prevented. We reach out to our inkstand, and find that the pen which always lies in it has disappeared; or we glance round the breakfast-room, and notice that a picture which always hangs upon a certain wall has gone. We have not been wont to recognise the pen and the picture; they were just matters of course. Now that they are absent, however, the situation jars upon us; we have a pronounced feeling of helplessness or of displeased surprise. That is as far, perhaps, as ordinary observation goes; but there is really more to be observed. For at the moment of disturbance, before the disagreeable feeling has arisen, the ‘of-course’ feeling springs up in unusual strength; it is as if, for a brief space, we reverted in imagination to a true recognition of the missing object. And even after the displeasure is there, we may go back more than once to the familiar state of affairs; we can’t believe, as we say, we can’t trust our eyes, the thing has always been in that place; so that the glow of recognition alternates with the dominant feeling. In a word, the disturbance of apprehension has brought back to life certain stages in the past history of the brain-habit, stages in which the nerve-processes had as their correlates the mental processes that make up the feeling of familiarity.

This passage of recognition, from the characteristic feeling of familiarity through the weaker of-course feeling into a sheer brain-habit or nervous set, illustrates the descending phase of a progression which is typical in psychology, and which is summed up in the law of mental growth and decay. We are constantly finding that a mental formation, a particular complex of mental processes, is at first thin and scant, then enriches itself by various supplementary processes, and then again thins out or tails off—finally, into mental nothingness; and recognition illustrates the downward half of the curve. The law was strongly insisted on by the late G. H. Lewes, an author who wrote largely on psychological topics, but who is better known to the general reader from his association with George Eliot. “This process,” Lewes tell us, “underlies all development. The voluntary actions become involuntary, the involuntary become automatic; the intelligent become habitual, and the habitual become instinctive. It is the same in the higher regions of intellect: the slow acquisitions of centuries of research become condensed into axioms which are intuitions.” We have already met the law in our discussions of attention and meaning; and we shall meet it again when we come to discuss action.

§ 40. The Memory-Idea.—But where, all this while, is the memory-image? If you had been asked, before you read the foregoing paragraphs, what happens when you recognise somebody or something, you would probably have replied, as the associationists reply: ‘The present sight of the object calls up an image of that object, by the law of similarity; then the image or idea is compared with the perception, and the two are found to agree; and this agreement is what I mean by recognition.’ If it were then objected that observation fails to show any such idea or image, you would perhaps have said: ‘The whole thing takes place so quickly that the factors cannot ordinarily be distinguished; but all the same that is what must happen.’ And so you would have kept your faith in the image.

Such an image may, in fact, appear. It may appear in the cases of halting and partial recognition that we referred to on p. 181; but it need not necessarily appear even there; its intervention is, indeed, as rare as the third type of mental connection, the clean-cut succession of p. 161. You will perhaps get at the heart of the matter most easily if we lay down, at once, the general principle that no imaginal process or complex of imaginal processes is in its own right a memory-idea. Even if the simple images which compose it are different from sensations (p. 77), it must still be called a complex image, and nothing more; not an idea of memory. A complex of imaginal processes becomes, is made into, a memory-idea by an attendant feeling of familiarity; just exactly as a perception, a complex of sensory processes, is made into a recognition of something by the same feeling of familiarity. So that an idea, in order to be a memory-idea, must bear the memory-label; and the label will be either the sense-feeling of familiarity proper, or else some weaker and more fleeting feeling of the ‘of-course’ kind. It is true, again, that an idea which has lived through this history may be taken as a memory-idea when the label has dropped away; but even then it is a memory-idea, not in its own right, but in right of the brain-habit behind it. No group of images, taken out of its mental setting or removed from the directive pressure of a brain-habit, can be known as a memory; it might be hallucination or dream or imagination or anything else; it is just a group of images.

Our quarrel with popular psychology goes further still. The whole notion that a memory-idea is a copy of past experience is wrong; the idea may copy the perception, but it need not; and usually it does not. You remember that, after we had formulated our own law of mental connection, we introduced the catch-phrase ‘marriage by proxy’; and you remember why. What, now, is the essential thing about a memory-idea? Not, surely, that it should copy past experience, but that it should mean past experience. Our individual equipment of images is so variable (p. 139) that we should be very badly off if we were limited, in what we remember, to copies of our perceptions; A, who has no visual images, could then remember nothing that he had seen, and B, who has no auditory images, could remember nothing that he had heard! Such are the straits to which popular psychology must logically reduce us. In point of fact, A remembers well enough what he has seen; only, the visual parts of his experience are translated into other modes, perhaps verbal-motor. In that event a verbal-motor image, set in the right context and accompanied by a feeling of familiarity, may mean for A some visual object that he perceived so many years since. It goes flat against common sense to assert that a verbal-motor image is the ‘memory’ of the visual perception; and yet that is just what the verbal-motor image, in its present setting, actually is.

This translation of perception into imagery of another mode has curious consequences. I may declare positively that I remember having heard Patti sing forty years ago, when all that I really remember is the statement itself, the form of words which carries my meaning. Nay more, if my mind is of the imaginal type, I may have taken my cue from the verbal statement, and have conjured up a mental picture of the performance, a picture now so familiar that I could swear to the pink dress,—were it not that a contemporary notice writes it down as cream! Words often repeated are in this way highly deceptive; and there is good psychology in the story of the traveller who told his romantic tales so often that he finally believed them himself. Many of us, if we would but confess it, remember things that happened before we were born; the account of them was impressed on us in childhood, and was later bodied forth in images; and now their ideas bear the memory-label. Here, then, is one source of the ‘untrustworthiness’ of memory, which is at the same time a possible source of the Platonic doctrine of reminiscence.

§ 41. Illusions of Recognition and Memory.—Psychologically, an illusory memory is a memory, just as an illusory perception is a perception. We speak of illusion when our experience fails to square with what, from our knowledge of external circumstances and of other like experiences, we might have expected; the distinction is therefore practical, not scientific. We shall avail ourselves of it, partly for convenience’ sake, and partly because certain cases of illusion offer special problems to the psychologist.

Most of us, probably, have an occasional acquaintance with what is called paramnesia or wrong recognition: a definite ‘feeling that all this has happened before,’ sometimes connected with a ‘feeling that we know exactly what is coming,’—a ‘feeling’ which persists for a few seconds and carries positive conviction, in spite of the fact and the knowledge that the experience is novel; Dickens gives an instance in David Copperfield. Various explanations have been offered of the phenomenon. It occurs most frequently after periods of emotional stress, or in the state of extreme mental fatigue; that is, at a time when the associative tendencies in the brain are abnormally weak; and it seems to depend, essentially, upon a disjunction of mental processes that are normally held together in a single state of attention. Suppose the following case: you are about to cross a crowded street, and you take a hasty glance in both directions to make sure of a safe passage. Now your eye is caught, for a moment, by the contents of a shop window; and you pause, though only for a moment, to survey the window before you actually cross the street. Paramnesia would then appear as the feeling that you had already crossed; the preliminary glance up and down, which ordinarily connects with the crossing in a single attentive experience, is disjoined from the crossing; the look at the window, casual as it was, has been able to disrupt the associative tendencies. As you cross, then, you think ‘Why, I crossed this street just now’; your nervous system has severed two phases of a single experience, both of which are familiar, and the latter of which appears accordingly as a repetition of the earlier. The illusion will evidently be strengthened if, as is only natural, the casual look at the window does not recur to you. This is an imaginary case, simplified for clearness of exposition; and we cannot be at all sure that the explanation which it suggests is correct; for cases of paramnesia cannot be realised at will, and the nervous condition that leads to them is not favourable to scientific observation; but something of the sort must take place.

Illusions of memory have been touched upon on p. 186. We may remember something that never happened; we may remember something that happened, but could not have happened to us; we make all kinds of mistakes in memory; we fail to remember a great deal that has happened. These chances of error are inherent in the laws of associative tendency, and in the character of the memory-image. There is one illusion, however, that requires a word of comment: the illusion of the ‘good old days,’ the tendency of every man past middle age to be laudator temporis acti se puero. This has often been referred to the principle that we remember pleasurable experiences better than unpleasurable; we are so constituted, it is said, that the disagreeable events of our past life are forgotten and the agreeable are conserved in memory. The principle, however, has never been established, and there is some experimental evidence against it. In all probability, the illusion is due to many contributing factors. First of all, our nervous system takes its general set in childhood; it is then that we acquire standards of right and wrong, of social position, of daily intercourse and occupation. In so far as later experiences interfere with this set, the old order will be preferred. Secondly, our self-centredness (p. 2) leads us to idealise our past self; we think of ourselves as more important, more heroic, more dominating, more regarded, not only than we were, but also than any youngster of our sort could possibly have been; autobiographies, however truthful in intention, bring out the point with sufficient clearness. So we contrast our present struggles with the triumphs of an unreal past. Thirdly, the old days were, in one sense, really happier for us than the new; happier because we had no responsibilities, because there was a generation of adults to whom we could appeal; and we are very prone to confuse our own greater comfort with a better status of society. These are obvious considerations, but they and things like them are enough to account for the illusion.

§ 42. The Pattern of Memory.—Psychology cannot yet offer any adequate description of the pattern that mental processes display, the arrangement that they fall into, when we are remembering. Memory, as we are all aware, may occur in the state of primary attention, when we call it remembrance, or in the state of secondary attention, when we call it recollection. Something may be said under both heads; but our account must be largely figurative and conventional.

Let us take remembrance first. There seems to be, as it were in the background, something that holds us down to a particular circle of ideas, or, in other words, that limits the play of ideas to some particular situation. This something may be a group of contextual mental processes, or may be merely a nervous disposition; we shall have more to say of it later (§ 48). Upon the background move mental processes of extraordinary instability, all of them tinged more or less strongly by the feeling of familiarity. Attention is labile and fluid; the focus is occupied now by visual or other imagery, now by scraps of kinÆsthesis, and now by organic or verbal processes that carry a personal meaning and reference; and the whole mental stream contracts and expands, pauses and hurries, and shows the most abrupt changes of direction. All of which is sadly vague! but let the reader catch himself ‘reminiscing,’ and he will realise the general truth of the description, and also the extreme difficulty of making it more concrete.

In recollection, the background is filled by the intent to recall; and this intent may, again, be constituted by contextual mental processes or carried by a nervous set. The course of recollection may then be characterised as a reconstruction along the lines of least resistance. Some bit of imagery, some form of words comes up, and is at once met, so to say, by the feeling of familiarity. Further ideas present themselves, in more or less disorderly fashion, and the feeling plays upon them, accepting here and rejecting there, serving throughout the experience as a court of final appeal. Some of the ideas are directly recognised; some seem to force our acceptance by their vividness; some pass muster because familiar verbal ideas, names or phrases, are connected with them. Some, that leave us in doubt as they arise, are shelved for the time, to be judged later on, when the positive acceptances are done with; and they are likely to be judged in the light of these acceptances, and of our general knowledge of the situation which we are trying to recall; even a weak recognitive feeling is enough to give them status. In and out among these ideas run threads of kinÆsthesis, which imitate or repeat fragments of the original experience. There is thus a veritable tangle of processes; the situation is not reproduced in image, and its items read off in logical order; it is rather reconstructed; and the reconstruction follows, as has been said, the lines of least resistance at the moment. Yet we are so accustomed to the logical order of speech that our narrative, as recollection proceeds, may give but little hint of the tangled interplay of ideas; at most we may correct ourselves at points, or remark that just now we left something out. Observe the flow of mind itself, and the disorder is apparent.

We may say, then, that the pattern of memory is a discursive movement within fixed boundaries; the boundaries are given by the set or background, as we have named it, by the fact (in other words) that we are recalling a particular situation or event; and the discursiveness reveals itself in roaming of attention and shift of ideas, which imply a variable activity of the associative tendencies. The characteristic processes are the feeling of familiarity and the imitative kinÆsthesis.

§ 43 Mnemonics.—Rules for remembering, tricks of memorising, were considered of great importance in the ancient world; oratory was highly esteemed; and no orator before the time of Augustus would have ventured to use notes. As the art declined, these rules were less and less regarded; we hear practically nothing of them between the first and the thirteenth centuries of the present era. From that date, however, interest in artificial memory-systems has never died out; they have been recommended for sermons, for lectures, for disputations, for public speeches, for the learning of foreign languages, for examinations, for practically every occasion in which memory is employed, as well as for the improvement of memory itself.

The great principle of mnemonics is that you remember the novel and the disconnected by bringing it into arbitrary relation to the familiar and the connected. Everybody, for instance, is thoroughly at home in his own house; the positions of the rooms are known, and their employment for the necessary purposes of the family holds them together. Suppose, then, that you are to deliver a speech, and that the speech has eight principal points. You think of yourself as entering the house: the first point you deposit in the hall, the second in the drawing-room, the third in the library, the fourth in the back hall, the fifth in the kitchen, the sixth in the pantry, the seventh in the dining-room, the eighth on the upstairs landing. You think of yourself as making the separate points in these different places; if possible, you invent some fanciful connection between the point and the place where you deposit it; if, for example, your second or drawing-room point is an historical reference, you might think of ‘drawing a hiss’ from your audience; anything will do, provided it is the sort of thing to stick! This local or topographical way of memorising has always been popular; it is said that our ordinary phrases ‘in the first place,’ ‘in the second place,’ derive from it. Number-alphabets, in which certain letters stand for certain figures, are also much employed; dates, physical constants, statistical numbers, may thus be memorised. The rhythm of verse has been appealed to; if you want to remember the seven cities that laid claim to the birth of Homer, you learn the hexameter-line ‘Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Salamis, Rhodos, Argos, AthenÆ’; and you are helped—if further help is wanted—by the pattern of the initial letters SCCS-RAA.

Such devices have a special and temporary utility; we have all taken examinations, and probably we have all had recourse to them on a larger or smaller scale. Many of us have paid the not infrequent penalty; we have remembered our mnemonic doggerel, but have forgotten the key to it, and so have forgotten the events or numbers that it was meant to recall; there is always that danger. No scheme of memory-aids that is universally applicable and universally reliable has been or can be discovered; there is no royal road to learning. In so far as a mnemonic rule follows the laws of associative tendency, as for many minds the local or topographical rule seems to do; or in so far as it chimes with some peculiarity of individual thinking; in so far, it will be of practical service in daily life; that is the most that can be said.

§ 44. The Idea of Imagination.—We think of memory as reproducing the old, and of imagination, no less positively, as producing the new; the very word poet means the maker, and the word artist means the fitter or joiner. Imagination cannot, of course, give us new qualities of experience; we cannot imagine a new colour, different from all known colours, or a new sensation—say, a specific sensation of electricity—different from the known sensations of skin and underlying tissues. Imagination does, however, give us novel connections; and experiment shows that an idea comes to us as imagined only if it comes as unfamiliar, with the feeling of novelty or strangeness upon it.

In real life, the feeling of strangeness is soon swamped by alien feelings, by the artist’s joy or pride, dissatisfaction or despair; in the laboratory, it appears strongly by itself. The observers speak of a feeling of novelty, of personal detachment, of creepiness, of weirdness, of something out of the ordinary, of peculiar discomfort. Compare this list of terms with a sentence from Lafcadio Hearn’s last book: “The outward strangeness of things in Japan produces a queer thrill impossible to describe,—a feeling of weirdness which comes to us only with the perception of the totally unfamiliar”; there is no doubt that the same experience is intended. It is, at first thought, a little surprising that an idea of imagination, which after all derives from the observers’ own experience, and which is obtained under the rather tame and colourless conditions of a psychological experiment, should have so strong a tinge of feeling. Yet we need not be surprised; for we have already learned that the novel stimulus has power to compel the attention; it stands alone and unrelated; and for that reason it startles and arrests us (p. 94). If the ideas aroused in the laboratory mattered, if they were practically important for their owners’ careers, then the feeling of strangeness would, as we have said, be overborne by other feelings; but they do not matter, and so can be developed and observed for what they are.

An idea, then, becomes or is made into an idea of imagination by its mental setting, which is this feeling of strangeness, the opposite of the feeling of familiarity. As regards the nature of the feeling, we may guess that it is the modern representative of primitive man’s anxiety and uneasiness in face of the unknown, an echo from the time when the new was the dangerous (p. 179). If the idea is often repeated, the feeling wears off, and is replaced by a directive brain-habit; we still take it as an idea of imagination, but we do not re-imagine it. If it is still further repeated, it ceases even to be taken as imaginative, and becomes one of the habitual images that we spoke of on p. 77.

There is a second difference between the idea of imagination and the idea of memory: the difference, namely, that the former cannot be replaced by another mode of imagery. An idea of imagination must not simply mean something new; it must be something new. We know that images of imagination are not indispensable to artistic work; painters do not necessarily possess visual imagery (p. 141). Where the idea of imagination does exist, however, it keeps its original form. The French mural painter Puvis de Chavannes used to contemplate, for days together, the bare spaces that he was to fill; ‘wasting time,’ a friend told him, and received the reply “I have to see my picture before I can paint it.” In a case like this, the mental picture—though it may be modified as the actual colours are laid on, or as new outlines suggest themselves to the painter—must, so far as it furnishes a guide and model, hold its form and colour-scheme almost as fixedly as a perception; otherwise it would be useless. So a man may be a very good musician, and possess no auditory images. Yet Beethoven composed his Ninth Symphony in 1823, when he had long been deaf; and he could not even have helped his mental ear by the kinÆsthesis of singing, since without special education the deaf soon lose control of the larynx. In his case, therefore, the auditory imagination must not only have held good, but must also have grown more complex and more keenly discriminative, up to the very end. No doubt, he was aided by the eye; the symphony grew on paper, a theme at a time; and, no doubt also, he used his general knowledge of what would sound aright and what would not; he was a practised composer. But, when all allowance is made, his main reliance must have been on auditory imagery, and this must have remained as stable as auditory perception. Such instances prove that the idea of imagination runs a different course from the idea of memory. The memory-idea is common to all minds; it persists as meaning, under the limitations of imaginal type and the general laws of associative tendency. The idea of imagination seems to depend rather upon special endowment; it persists in kind, also under the limitations of imaginal type; and it is conserved by some special grouping or ‘convergence’ of associative tendencies (p. 158). We do not hesitate to describe a man as ‘wholly lacking in imagination,’ though we should look upon a total lack of memory as a sign of mental incompetence; and the common phrase brings out, well enough, this personal or idiosyncratic character of the idea of imagination.

§ 45. The Pattern of Imagination.—Imagination, like memory, may occur in the state of primary or of secondary attention. In the former case we call it receptive, in the latter case constructive imagination.

What happens in receptive imagination is, in principle, very simple. We are confronted by new perceptions or ideas, and we supplement these experiences by complex images of the appropriate kind. We read, for instance, a traveller’s account of an African forest, and we picture the forest as we read; we receive the score of a new song, and the melody sings itself to us as we run our eye over the printed notes; we stand upon an historic site, and rehearse in image the scenes that it has witnessed. A certain definite direction is given to our ideas by the presented stimuli; then the ideas, as they come in their predetermined order, are supplemented in this imaginal way.

The characteristic feeling of strangeness, in such cases, is often interfused with an experience which might, at first sight, seem incompatible with it; the ’feeling’ of our own concernment in the imagined situation. We have a natural tendency to feel ourselves into what we perceive or imagine. As we read about the forest, we may, as it were, become the explorer; we feel for ourselves the gloom, the silence, the humidity, the oppression, the sense of lurking danger; everything is strange, but it is to us that the strange experience has come. We are told of a shocking accident, and we gasp and shrink and feel nauseated as we imagine it; we are told of some new and delightful fruit, and our mouth waters as if we were about to taste it. This tendency to feel oneself into a situation is called empathy,—on the analogy of sympathy, which is feeling together with another; and empathic ideas are psychologically interesting, because they are the converse of perceptions: their core is imaginal, and their context is made up of sensations, the kinÆsthetic and organic sensations that carry the empathic meaning. Like the feeling of strangeness, they are characteristic of imagination. In memory, their place is taken by the imitative experiences, which repeat over again certain phases of the original situation.

What happens in constructive imagination is not so easy to say. Genius is defined sometimes as the capacity of doing great things without effort, and sometimes as the capacity of taking infinite pains; and constructive imagination, in the same way, is represented now as a native gift that finds rather than seeks expression, and now as a sort of skilled labour, a matter of planning and moulding and constructing. There is probably truth on both sides, and a degree of truth that varies with the individual make-up of the artist; in general, however, there is more hard work and less inspiration than is usually supposed. The poet or the inventor starts out with a more or less definite plan or aim or ambition; and the plan persists, if only as a nervous disposition, to determine the course of his ideas. It also helps to initiate the imaginative complex, the first clue to which seems in fact to come, at least ordinarily, as an inspiration, a happy thought; some external situation, or some grouping of the associative tendencies that is active at the moment, touches off the disposition, and the initial idea flashes into mind. Whether this first idea is crude or complete, and whether the stream of later ideas is broad or narrow, these things depend altogether upon circumstances. Now, at any rate, begins the stage of skilled labour; the idea is worked upon and worked over; the plan decides what shall be accepted, what rejected, what put aside for another trial; we are reminded of the course of recollection,—only that rejection, active as it is in memory, is still more to the fore in imagination, and construction is more critical than reconstruction. Here and there other happy thoughts may crop up; but in essentials this stage of hard work continues, until the idea attains its final expression in objective terms, in the words of the poem, for instance, or in the effective machine. Meantime, there have been all sorts of feelings. The imaginative ideas bring with them their own feeling of strangeness; but this may be overwhelmed by the joy of success or the irritation of failure; and these feelings may themselves alternate, swinging from extreme to extreme. Meantime, also, there have been all sorts of empathic experiences, which have formed about the focal processes, vivifying and personalising the partial products of the constructive effort; and they too find their natural term in the actual accomplishment of the imaginative task. Figurative, again, all this, and lamentably far from scientific accuracy,—but, in broad outline and on the average, we may hope that it is true to the psychological facts.

How, now, does the pattern of imagination compare with that of memory? We saw that the memory-pattern is that of discursive movement within fixed boundaries, the limits set by the fixity of the past occurrence which is remembered. Imagination, on the other hand, is a more or less steady flow, in a single direction, from the fountain-head of disposition; there are no limits of any kind, save those of individual capacity and experience; but the course is determined by the initial plan or ambition. Memory is discursive movement within fixed boundaries; imagination is progressive movement from a constant source. Memory is characterised by the feeling of familiarity and by imitative kinÆsthesis; imagination by the feeling of strangeness and by empathy.

Questions and Exercises

(1) Memory, like recognition, may be definite or indefinite, direct or indirect. Can you give instances from your own experience?

(2) Suppose that you were required to write a defence of cramming. Could you find materials in these two chapters?

(3) Memory fails as old age comes on; it decays, as we say, in old age; and the course of decay is well-marked and uniform. Can you give any account of it? And can you explain the course from statements made in these two chapters?

(4) Do you think that memory can be improved? Be sure, before you answer, that you have read a clear meaning into the question. Give reasons for your answer.

(5) It has been said that we have no memory, but only memories. In what sense or senses is this statement true?

(6) Memory has been described as a storehouse of ideas, as a power to revive perceptions, as a universal function of organic matter, and as decaying sense. Try to realise clearly what the users of these phrases had in mind; say what you can in their favour; show in what respects they are inadequate to the psychology of memory.

(7) Can you give instances of empathy, from your own experience: in the reading of history or fiction, in the viewing of architecture or landscape, in watching an actor or a musician or an athlete, in day-dreaming? Describe as accurately as you can the different ‘feel’ of empathy and sympathy; do not be satisfied with meanings.

(8) (a) Read Hawthorne’s preface to The House of the Seven Gables and G. P. Lathrop’s Introduction. What light do they throw on the mechanics of constructive imagination? (b) Read Poe’s essay on The Philosophy of Composition. Is the writer’s psychology sound? Do you take him to have been wholly sincere? Why? Be definite.

(9) It has been suggested that the pattern of constructive imagination might be studied in the first drafts (where the manuscripts have been preserved) of poems, especially of lyric poems. What have you to say to the plan?

(10) Has imagination, in the ordinary sense, any place in science? Can you justify your answer in psychological terms?

(11) A recent writer declares that “the idea of a centaur is a complex mental picture composed of the ideas of man and horse.” The statement is unpsychological in the highest degree. Why?

(12) What have you to say, from what you have learned of receptive imagination, (a) of book-illustrations in general, (b) of Cruikshank’s and Seymour’s and Browne’s illustrations of Dickens, and (c) of an illustrated edition of George Meredith’s works?

References

Quintilian, Institutes of the Orator, bk. xi., ch. 2; G. H. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, i., 1874, 229; W. James, Principles of Psychology, i., 1890, ch. xvi.; E. Hering, On Memory, 1895; T. Ribot, Diseases of Memory, 1882; Essay on the Creative Imagination, 1906; E. B. Titchener, Text-book of Psychology, 1910, 396 ff.; a series of articles by F. Kuhlmann, in American Journal of Psychology, 1905, 1907, 1909; Psychological Review, 1906; Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1907; articles on Imagination, Memory, Mnemonic Verses, in Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, 1901-2; article on Cram, by W. S. Jevons, in Mind, ii., 1877, 193 ff.