A Beginner's Psychology

by Edward Bradford Titchener

The great principle of mnemonics is that you remember the novel and the disconnected by bringing it into arbitrary relation to the familiar and the connected. Everybody, for instance, is thoroughly at home in his own house; the positions of the rooms are known, and their employment for the necessary purposes of the family holds them together. Suppose, then, that you are to deliver a speech, and that the speech has eight principal points. You think of yourself as entering the house: the first point you deposit in the hall, the second in the drawing-room, the third in the library, the fourth in the back hall, the fifth in the kitchen, the sixth in the pantry, the seventh in the dining-room, the eighth on the upstairs landing. You think of yourself as making the separate points in these different places; if possible, you invent some fanciful connection between the point and the place where you deposit it; if, for example, your second or drawing-room point is an historical reference, you might think of ‘drawing a hiss’ from your audience; anything will do, provided it is the sort of thing to stick! This local or topographical way of memorising has always been popular; it is said that our ordinary phrases ‘in the first place,’ ‘in the second place,’ derive from it. Number-alphabets, in which certain letters stand for certain figures, are also much employed; dates, physical constants, statistical numbers, may thus be memorised. The rhythm of verse has been appealed to; if you want to remember the seven cities that laid claim to the birth of Homer, you learn the hexameter-line ‘Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Salamis, Rhodos, Argos, Athenæ’; and you are helped—if further help is wanted—by the pattern of the initial letters SCCS-RAA.

Such devices have a special and temporary utility; we have all taken examinations, and probably we have all had recourse to them on a larger or smaller scale. Many of us have paid the not infrequent penalty; we have remembered our mnemonic doggerel, but have forgotten the key to it, and so have forgotten the events or numbers that it was meant to recall; there is always that danger. No scheme of memory-aids that is universally applicable and universally reliable has been or can be discovered; there is no royal road to learning. In so far as a mnemonic rule follows the laws of associative tendency, as for many minds the local or topographical rule seems to do; or in so far as it chimes with some peculiarity of individual thinking; in so far, it will be of practical service in daily life; that is the most that can be said.

[§ 44]. The Idea of Imagination.—We think of memory as reproducing the old, and of imagination, no less positively, as producing the new; the very word poet means the maker, and the word artist means the fitter or joiner. Imagination cannot, of course, give us new qualities of experience; we cannot imagine a new colour, different from all known colours, or a new sensation—say, a specific sensation of electricity—different from the known sensations of skin and underlying tissues. Imagination does, however, give us novel connections; and experiment shows that an idea comes to us as imagined only if it comes as unfamiliar, with the feeling of novelty or strangeness upon it.

In real life, the feeling of strangeness is soon swamped by alien feelings, by the artist’s joy or pride, dissatisfaction or despair; in the laboratory, it appears strongly by itself. The observers speak of a feeling of novelty, of personal detachment, of creepiness, of weirdness, of something out of the ordinary, of peculiar discomfort. Compare this list of terms with a sentence from Lafcadio Hearn’s last book: “The outward strangeness of things in Japan produces a queer thrill impossible to describe,—a feeling of weirdness which comes to us only with the perception of the totally unfamiliar”; there is no doubt that the same experience is intended. It is, at first thought, a little surprising that an idea of imagination, which after all derives from the observers’ own experience, and which is obtained under the rather tame and colourless conditions of a psychological experiment, should have so strong a tinge of feeling. Yet we need not be surprised; for we have already learned that the novel stimulus has power to compel the attention; it stands alone and unrelated; and for that reason it startles and arrests us (p. 94). If the ideas aroused in the laboratory mattered, if they were practically important for their owners’ careers, then the feeling of strangeness would, as we have said, be overborne by other feelings; but they do not matter, and so can be developed and observed for what they are.

An idea, then, becomes or is made into an idea of imagination by its mental setting, which is this feeling of strangeness, the opposite of the feeling of familiarity. As regards the nature of the feeling, we may guess that it is the modern representative of primitive man’s anxiety and uneasiness in face of the unknown, an echo from the time when the new was the dangerous (p. 179). If the idea is often repeated, the feeling wears off, and is replaced by a directive brain-habit; we still take it as an idea of imagination, but we do not re-imagine it. If it is still further repeated, it ceases even to be taken as imaginative, and becomes one of the habitual images that we spoke of on p. 77.

There is a second difference between the idea of imagination and the idea of memory: the difference, namely, that the former cannot be replaced by another mode of imagery. An idea of imagination must not simply mean something new; it must be something new. We know that images of imagination are not indispensable to artistic work; painters do not necessarily possess visual imagery (p. 141). Where the idea of imagination does exist, however, it keeps its original form. The French mural painter Puvis de Chavannes used to contemplate, for days together, the bare spaces that he was to fill; ‘wasting time,’ a friend told him, and received the reply “I have to see my picture before I can paint it.” In a case like this, the mental picture—though it may be modified as the actual colours are laid on, or as new outlines suggest themselves to the painter—must, so far as it furnishes a guide and model, hold its form and colour-scheme almost as fixedly as a perception; otherwise it would be useless. So a man may be a very good musician, and possess no auditory images. Yet Beethoven composed his Ninth Symphony in 1823, when he had long been deaf; and he could not even have helped his mental ear by the kinæsthesis of singing, since without special education the deaf soon lose control of the larynx. In his case, therefore, the auditory imagination must not only have held good, but must also have grown more complex and more keenly discriminative, up to the very end. No doubt, he was aided by the eye; the symphony grew on paper, a theme at a time; and, no doubt also, he used his general knowledge of what would sound aright and what would not; he was a practised composer. But, when all allowance is made, his main reliance must have been on auditory imagery, and this must have remained as stable as auditory perception. Such instances prove that the idea of imagination runs a different course from the idea of memory. The memory-idea is common to all minds; it persists as meaning, under the limitations of imaginal type and the general laws of associative tendency. The idea of imagination seems to depend rather upon special endowment; it persists in kind, also under the limitations of imaginal type; and it is conserved by some special grouping or ‘convergence’ of associative tendencies (p. 158). We do not hesitate to describe a man as ‘wholly lacking in imagination,’ though we should look upon a total lack of memory as a sign of mental incompetence; and the common phrase brings out, well enough, this personal or idiosyncratic character of the idea of imagination.

[§ 45]. The Pattern of Imagination.—Imagination, like memory, may occur in the state of primary or of secondary attention. In the former case we call it receptive, in the latter case constructive imagination.

What happens in receptive imagination is, in principle, very simple. We are confronted by new perceptions or ideas, and we supplement these experiences by complex images of the appropriate kind. We read, for instance, a traveller’s account of an African forest, and we picture the forest as we read; we receive the score of a new song, and the melody sings itself to us as we run our eye over the printed notes; we stand upon an historic site, and rehearse in image the scenes that it has witnessed. A certain definite direction is given to our ideas by the presented stimuli; then the ideas, as they come in their predetermined order, are supplemented in this imaginal way.

The characteristic feeling of strangeness, in such cases, is often interfused with an experience which might, at first sight, seem incompatible with it; the ’feeling’ of our own concernment in the imagined situation. We have a natural tendency to feel ourselves into what we perceive or imagine. As we read about the forest, we may, as it were, become the explorer; we feel for ourselves the gloom, the silence, the humidity, the oppression, the sense of lurking danger; everything is strange, but it is to us that the strange experience has come. We are told of a shocking accident, and we gasp and shrink and feel nauseated as we imagine it; we are told of some new and delightful fruit, and our mouth waters as if we were about to taste it. This tendency to feel oneself into a situation is called empathy,—on the analogy of sympathy, which is feeling together with another; and empathic ideas are psychologically interesting, because they are the converse of perceptions: their core is imaginal, and their context is made up of sensations, the kinæsthetic and organic sensations that carry the empathic meaning. Like the feeling of strangeness, they are characteristic of imagination. In memory, their place is taken by the imitative experiences, which repeat over again certain phases of the original situation.