684 PSYOHOLOOr. 



very last to decay. Kussmaul* makes the following acute 

 remark on this subject : 



"The concreter a conception is, the sooner is its name forgotten. 

 This is because our ideas of persons and things are less strongly bound 

 up with their names than with such abstractions as their business, their 

 circumstances, their qualities. We easily can imagine persons and 

 things without their names, the sensorial image of them being more 

 important than that other symbolic image, their name. Abstract con- 

 ceptions, on the other hand, are only acquired by means of the words 

 which alone serve to confer stability upon them. This is why verbs, 

 adjectives, pronouns, and still more adverbs, prepositions, and con- 

 junctions are more intimately connected with our thinking than are 

 substantives. " 



The disease called Aphasia, of which a little was said 

 in Chapter II, has let in a flood of light on the phenome- 

 non of Memory, by showing the number of ways in which 

 the use of a given object, like a word, may be lost by the 

 mind. We may lose our acoustic idea or our articulatory 

 idea of it ; neither without the other will give us proper 

 command of the word. And if we have both, but have lost the 

 paths of association between the brain-centres which sup- 

 port the two, we are in as bad a plight. ' Ataxic ' and * am- 

 nesic ' aphasia, ' word-deafness,' and * associative aphasia ' 

 are all practical losses of word-memory. We have thus, as 

 M. Ribot says, not memory so much as memories.f The 

 visual, the tactile, the muscular, the auditory memory may 

 all vary independently of each other in the same individual ; 

 and different individuals may have them developed in dif- 

 ferent degrees. As a rule, a man's memory is good in the 

 departments in which his interest is strong ; but those de- 

 partments are apt to be those in which his discriminative 

 sensibility is high. A man with a bad ear is not likely to 

 have practically a good musical memory, or a purblind per- 

 son to remember visual appearances well. In a later chap- 

 ter we shall see illustrations of the differences in men's 

 imagining power. :j: It is olnaous that the machinery of 

 memory must be largely determined thereby. 



* Stbrungen der Sprache, quoted by Ribot, Les Maladies de la M. , p 133. 

 f Op. cit. chap. III. 



X "Those who have a good memory for figures are in general those 

 who know best how to handle them, that is, those who are most familiar 



