MEMORIAL DAY 



3728 



MEMORY 



believed the sounds to be Memnon's morning 

 greeting to his mother. The musical notes 

 ceased after the statue was restored by Severus. 



THE "VOCAL MEMNON" AT THEBES 



MEMO 'RIAL DAY. See DECORATION DAY. 



MEMORY, mem' ori. Occasionally there is 

 a person who possesses a power of memory 

 which seems to others little short of miracu- 

 lous. Lord Macaulay could repeat accurately 

 a long poem after hearing it read once, and it 

 is said that had all copies of Paradise Lost 

 been destroyed, he could have restored the 

 poem from memory. There was "Blind Tom," 

 too, who could listen to an extended and dif- 

 ficult musical composition and then reproduce 

 it note for note on the piano. Other people, 

 reading of such prodigies, are likely to feel 

 discouraged and to exclaim, "I have no mem- 

 ory;" but such a statement cannot be true of 

 any normal human being. The man who had 

 "no memory" would not know his father and 

 mother or recognize his own face in the mirror ; 

 he would not realize when he was thirsty that 

 it was water he needed, or that letting the 

 sunlight into a room would banish darkness. 



A Definition. Memory is the power which 

 the mind has to revive past experiences and to 

 be conscious of the fact that it has had them 

 before. In the article on HABIT there is a ref- 

 erence to the fact that the nervous system has 

 a tendency, when it has once acted in a certain 

 manner, to act in that same manner again, and 

 memory is but another phase of that same 

 tendency. The second part of the definition 

 above, however, shows the distinguishing fea- 

 ture of memory the recalling of the past 

 impression must be conscious. Sometimes a 



person, because of some shock or accident, has 

 impressions wiped from his mind as completely 

 as writing is erased from a blackboard. When 

 he starts to readjust himself to life he may 

 find himself possessed of a tendency to do 

 certain things he may shrink instinctively, for 

 instance, from high places; but if this shrink- 

 ing does not recall to him the fact that he 

 once fell from such a place, the experience is 

 not in the fullest sense a memory. The same 

 case brings out another interesting distinction. 

 The man has lost his memories that is, he can 

 revive no impressions from his past; but his 

 memory may be unharmed. Everything which 

 has happened since his accident he may recall 

 perfectly, and he may be able to learn a poem 

 or master the details of a period of history as 

 well as he ever could. 



Memory, Imagination and Recognition. Stu- 

 dents of the mental processes psychologists, 

 we call them used to believe that memory was 

 a special mental power and had a part of the 

 brain all to itself, but further study has shown 

 that this is not so. It is, instead, connected 

 with every mental process, every feeling, every 

 sense perception. Thus one may remember the 

 taste of an orange, the scent of a jasmine, the 

 sound of the latest popular song, the color of 

 the house in the next block, the train of rea- 

 soning by which a certain result was reached, 

 or the grief which a sad announcement awak- 

 ened. 



Two other mental processes are closely re- 

 lated with memory imagination and recog- 

 nition; but there are distinctions. Memory 

 and imagination are alike because both deal 

 with objects which are not present to the 

 senses; the garden seen yesterday is to-day 

 just as nonexistent to the eyes of the one 

 who saw it as is the fanciful Garden of Eden 

 which he amuses himself by imagining. But 

 with the memory of the observed garden there 

 comes a feeling of familiarity there were trees 

 here, flowers there, a fountain in the center; 

 while in the imaginary picture all is strange 

 and new. It is the sense of familiarity, then, 

 that distinguishes memory from imagination. 



This feeling of familiarity recognition has 

 in common with memory, but recognition de- 

 mands an actual object, present at the time, 

 while memory may deal with something seen 

 once and never to be seen again. 



Verbal Memory and Logical Memory. Many 

 a child learns the multiplication table per- 

 fectly and can repeat it easily from "two times 

 two are four" to "twelve times twelve are one 



