The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2)

[591] E. Pick: Memory and its Doctors (1888), p. 7.

[592] This system is carried out in great detail in a book called 'Memory Training,' by Wm. L. Evans (1889).

[593] Paulhan, L'Activité mental, et les Éléments de l'Esprit (1889). p. 70.

[594] On Intelligence, i, 77-82.

[595] Psychology, § 201.

[596] Professor Höffding considers that the absence of contiguous associates distinctly thought-of is a proof that associative processes are not concerned in these cases of instantaneous recognition where we get a strong sense of familiarity with the object, but no recall of previous time or place. His theory of what happens is that the object before us, A, comes with a sense of familiarity whenever it awakens a slumbering image, a, of its own past self, whilst without this image it seems unfamiliar. The quality of familiarity is due to the coalescence of the two similar processes A + a in the brain (Psychologie, p. 188; Vierteljsch. f. wiss. Phil., xiii, 432 [1889]). This explanation is a very tempting one where the phenomenon of recognition is reduced to its simplest terms. Experiments have been performed in Wundt's laboratory by Messrs. Wolfe, see below, p. 679, and Lehmann (Philosophische Studien, v, 96), in which a person had to tell out of several closely resembling sensible impressions (sounds, tints of color) presented, which of them was the same with one presented a moment before. And it does seem here as if the fading process in the just-excited tract must combine with the process of the new impression to give to the latter a peculiar subjective tinge which should separate it from the impressions which the other objects give. But recognition of this immediate sort is beyond our power after a very short time has intervened.

A couple of minutes' interval is generally fatal to it; so that it is impossible to conceive that our frequent instantaneous recognition of a face, e.g., as having been met before, takes place by any such simple process. Where we associate a head of classification with the object, the time-interval has much less effect. Dr. Lehmann could identify shades of gray much more successfully and permanently after mentally attaching names or numbers to them. Here it is the recall of the contiguous associate, the number or name, which brings about the recognition. Where an experience is complex, each element of the total object has had the other elements for its past contiguous associates. Each element thus tends to revive the other elements from within, at the same time that the outward object is making them revive from without. We have thus, whenever we meet a familiar object, that sense of expectation gratified which is so large a factor in our æsthetic emotions; and even were there no 'fringe of tendency' toward the arousal of extrinsic associates (which there certainly always is), still this intrinsic play of mutual association among the parts would give a character of ease to familiar percepts which would make of them a distinct subjective class. A process fills its old bed in a different way from that in which it makes a new bed. One can appeal to introspection for proof.

When, for example, I go into a slaughter-house into which I once went years ago, and the horrid din of the screaming hogs strikes me with the overpowering sense of identification, when the blood-stained face of the 'sticker,' whom I had long ceased to think of, is immediately recognized as the face that struck me so before; when the dingy and reddened woodwork, the purple-flowing floor, the smell, the emotion of disgust, and all the details, in a word, forthwith re-establish themeelves as familiar occupants of my mind; the extraneous associates of the past time are anything but prominent. Again, in trying to think of an engraving, say the portrait of Rajah Brooke prefixed to his biography, I can do so only partially; but when I take down the book and, looking at the actual face, am smitten with the intimate sense of its sameness with the one I was striving to resuscitate,—where in the experience is the element of extrinsic association? In both these cases it surely feels as if the moment when the sense of recall is most vivid were also the moment when all extraneous associates were most suppressed. The butcher's face recalls the former walls of the shambles; their thought recalls the groaning beasts, and they the face again, just as I now experience them, with no different past ingredient. In like manner the peculiar deepening of my consciousness of the Rajah's physiognomy at the moment when I open the book and say "Ah! that's the very face!" is so intense as to banish from my mind all collateral circumstances, whether of the present or of former experiences.

But here it is the nose preparing tracts for the eye, the eye preparing them for the mouth, the mouth preparing them for the nose again, all these processes involving paths of contiguous association, as defended in the text. I cannot agree, therefore, with Prof. Höffding, in spite of my respect for him as a psychologist, that the phenomenon of instantaneous recognition is only explicable through the recall and comparison of the thing with its own past image. Nor can I see in the facts in question any additional ground for reinstating the general notion which we have already rejected (supra, p. 592) that a 'sensation' is ever received into the mind by an 'image' of its own past self. It is received by contiguous associates; or if they form too faint a fringe, its neural currents run into a bed which is still 'warm' from just-previous currents, and which consequently feel different from currents whose bed is cold. I agree, however, with Höffding that Dr. Lehmann's experiments (many of them) do not seem to prove the point which he seeks to establish. Lehmann, indeed, seems himself to believe that we recognize a sensation A by comparing it with its own past image α (loc. cit. p. 114), in which opinion I altogether fail to concur.

[597] Duality of the Mind, p. 84. The same thesis is defended by the late Mr. R. H. Proctor, who gives some cases rather hard to reconcile with my own proposed explanation, in 'Knowledge' for Nov. 8, 1884. See also Ribot, Maladies de la Mémoire, p. 149 ff.

[598] Zeitschr. f. Völkerpsychologie u. s. w., Bd. v, p. 146.

[599] Ueber das Gedächtniss, experimentelle Untersuchungen (1885), p. 64.

[600]Ibid. § 23.

[601]Op. cit. p. 103.

[602] All the inferences for which we can give no articulate reasons exemplify this law. In the chapter on Perception we shall have innumerable examples of it. A good pathological illustration of it is given in the curious observations of M. Binet on certain hysterical subjects, with anæsthetic hands, who saw what was done with their hands as an independent vision but did not feel it. The hand being hidden by a screen, the patient was ordered to look at another screen and to tell of any visual image which might project itself thereon. Numbers would then come, corresponding to the number of times the insensible member was raised, touched, etc. Colored lines and figures would come, corresponding to similar ones traced on the palm; the hand itself, or its fingers, would come when manipulated; and, finally, objects placed in it would come; but on the hand itself nothing could ever be felt. The whole phenomenon shows how an idea which remains itself below the threshold of a certain conscious self may occasion associative effects therein. The skin-sensations, unfelt by the patient's primary consciousness, awaken, nevertheless, their usual visual associates therein.

[603] I copy from the abstract of Wolfe's paper in 'Science' for Nov. 19, 1886. The original is in Psychologische Studien, iii, 534 ff.

[604] Essay conc. Human Understanding, ii, x, 5.

[605] Th. Ribot, Les Maladies de la Mémoire, p. 46.

[606] Biographia Literaria, ed. 1847, i, 117 (quoted in Carpenter's Mental Physiology, chapter x, which see for a number of other cases, all unfortunately deficient, like this one, in the evidence of exact verification which 'psychical research 'demands). Compare also Th. Ribot, Diseases of Memory, chap. iv. The knowledge of foreign words, etc., reported in trance mediums, etc., may perhaps often be explained by exaltation of memory. An hystero-epileptic girl, whose case I quoted in Proc. of Am. Soc. for Psychical Research, automatically writes an 'Ingoldsby Legend' in several cantos, which her parents say she 'had never read.' Of course she must have read or heard it, but perhaps never learned it. Of some macaronic Latin-English verses about a sea-serpent which her hand also wrote unconsciously, I have vainly sought the original (see Proc., etc., p. 553).

[607] Lectures on Metaph., ii, 212.

[608] Cf. on this point J. Delbœuf, Le Sommeil et les Rêves (1885), p. 119 ff.; R. Verdon, Forgetfulness, in Mind, ii, 437.

[609] Cf. A. Maury, Le Sommeil et les Rêves, p. 442.

[610] Störungen der Sprache, quoted by Ribot, Les Maladies de la M., p. 133.

[611] Op. cit. chap. iii.

[612] "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 with their relations to each other and to things." (A. Maury, Le Sommeil et les Rêves, p. 443.)

[613] Pp. 107-121.

[614] For other examples see Hamilton's Lectures, ii, 219, and A. Huber: Das Gedächtniss, p. 36 ff.

[615] Mind, ii, 449.

[616] Physiological Psychology, pt. ii, chap. x, § 23.

[617] Why not say 'know'?—W. J.