-j-^e THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



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 every- 

 thing he can recollect of that period in a very few pages. Let him 

 meet, for the first time after very many years, with sonre friend of his 

 boyhood, and talk over some interesting event in which they were both 

 eno-aged, 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 re- 

 tained 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 con- 

 densed 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 ex- 

 actly 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 pro- 

 portion 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 after- 

 life. 



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 con- 

 trary, 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 ncAV 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 



