92 



DISCOVERY 



popular speech and supposes that they stand for real 

 things. The truth is that it is one mind which is at 

 one time remembering, at another imagining, at 

 another doing both of these at once, or performing 

 some other combination of its numerous functions. 

 We may still use the word memory as a convenient 

 term for including all the mental functions which 

 result in the recall of past experience, but memory as 

 a faculty about which we can either assert or deny 

 the possibility of its improvement by practice must 

 be dismissed as a myth which modern psychological 

 thought has outgrown. 



Perhaps the force of the objection to this conception 

 of the faculty of memory will be felt most strongly if 

 we stop to consider the wide variety of mental func- 

 tions which may be exercised when we remember. Let 

 us take a few examples. 



First, I will ask you to remember the date of the 

 Battle of Hastings. 1066 jumps to your lips almost 

 before you have had time to think. It is unlikely 

 that you either saw or heard the date in your imagina- 

 tion, although some people would do so. Wliat has 

 happened is that a habit of repeating " Battle of 

 Hastings, 1066 " was so engrained in your mental 

 constitution by constant repetition in your school- 

 days, that the idea of the Battle of Hastings immedi- 

 ately causes the discharge of the appropriate motor 

 response ten sixty-six without any intervention of a 

 conscious process, except, perhaps, the very vague 

 feeling of the muscular movements necessary to make 

 the word. 



Secondly, will you try to remember whether some 

 familiar figure, let us say the clerk who usually attends 

 to you at the bank, has a moustache ? For those 

 who are not ready visualisers this will be found to be 

 rather a difficult operation. The method which we 

 all adopt (if, as I am assuming, we have never par- 

 ticularly noticed whether he has one or not) is to call 

 up a visual image of the person in question. This 

 may be clear and distinct, or dim and vague, according 

 to our powers of visualisation. We then try to see 

 whether this image has a moustache, and, if our 

 picture is too indistinct for us to be certain, we may 

 experiment by trying to picture his face with and without 

 a moustache, until we feel that we can recognise the 

 image as a true representation. If, as a result of our 

 inspection, we feel ourselves able to say confidently 

 that the man has a moustache, we say that we have 

 remembered this fact. 



As a third example of remembering, we may take 

 what remains of the present article in your mind 

 twenty-four hours after you have finished reading it. 

 It is improbable that it will have been entirely 

 obliterated from your mind ; in ordinary speech, you 

 will say that what remains of it in your mind is the 



part you remember. If you try to see how much of 

 it you can consciously recall at that time, you will 

 find yourself going through a very different mental 

 process from that involved in either of the two 

 previous examples. You will, for example, probably 

 be unable to recall any part of the visual experience 

 of seeing the actual words of the article by means of 

 visual images. If you can recall vaguely what the 

 article looked like on the page, that will be no help 

 to you in remembering it. Essentially you will be 

 recalling the meaning of its different parts, and the 

 logical connections between them. You may be able 

 to do this quite successfully, even if you can remember 

 none of the words of it at all, and if you succeed in 

 doing this you will say that you remember the article. 

 We have, then, in three cases of remembering, three 

 totally distinct kinds of mental activity, which we may 

 at first be tempted to say have nothing in common 

 except their name. What they have in common is, 

 in fact, no psychological property, but the fact of 

 practical importance only, that they all happen to be 

 methods of discovering things about our past experi- 

 ence. The word memory owes its existence to the 

 practical convenience of grouping together in speech 

 all the mental activities used in the recall of past 

 experience. The existence of the word does not 

 justify us in supposing that all of these activities are 

 in any psychological sense all of the same kind ; still 

 less does it justify us in supposing that there is some 

 mysterious entity, the memory, about which we can 

 make general statements such as the one which we 

 began by criticising. 



Of course, having decided that there is no such 

 thing as a memory, we shall go on using the word very 

 much as before. We shaU still feel the practical 

 convenience of being able to group together in speech 

 all the mental activities connected with the recall of 

 the past. But this prehminary discussion will have 

 robbed the word of its power to mislead us, to make 

 us believe that behind the word there is a thing. 



This is not, as perhaps it sounds, a question of merely 

 academic interest. It is one whose proper under- 

 standing will vitally affect our attitude towards all 

 the practical problems of memory. We need not, for 

 example, concern ourselves with the question of 

 whether our memory itself, as distinct from the ways 

 we have of remembering, is capable of improvement 

 by exercise. It is seen to be a question devoid of 

 meaning, for no such thing exists as a memory in the 

 sense presupposed by the question. The distinction 

 between the memory itself and other factors in the 

 successful recall of past experience is invalid. These 

 other factors are such things as : the attention we gave 

 to the experience at the time of its happening, our 

 methods of observation or learning, the imagery by 



