Principles of literary criticism

by I. A. Richards

Its wrinkled image lies, as then it lay

Immovably unquiet, and for ever

It trembles, but it cannot pass away!

Shelley, Ode to Liberty.

So far we have alluded only casually to memory, to that apparent revival of past experience to which the richness and complexity of experience is due. Every stimulus which is ever received leaves behind it, so it is said, an imprint, a trace capable of being revived later and of contributing its quota to consciousness and to behaviour. To these effects of past experience the systematic, the organised character of our behaviour is due; the fact that they intervene is the explanation of our ability to learn by experience. It is a way peculiar to living tissue by which the past influences our present behaviour across, as it might appear, a gulf of time.

How we should conceive this influence is perhaps the most puzzling point in psychology. The old theory of a kind of Somerset House of past impressions has given place to an account in terms of facilitations of neural paths, lowered resistances in synapses, and so forth. It was natural that as the broad outlines of neural activity came to be known, psychologists should attempt to make use of them. But on close examination it is clear that their interpretations were far too crude. Fixed ‘paths’, one for every item of experience which has ever taken place, and others for every kind of connection into which the items come, however multitudinous we make them, no longer explain what can be observed in behaviour and experience. As Von Kries and, more recently, Koffka have insisted, the fact, for example, that we recognise things in cases where it is certain that quite different paths must be involved, is fatal to the scheme. And mere multiplication of the entities invoked leads to no solution. Semon even goes so far as to say that when we listen to a song for the hundredth time we hear not only the singer but a chorus of nine and ninety mnemic voices. This corollary by itself is almost a refutation of his theory.

We have to escape from the crude assumption that the only way in which what is past can be repeated is by records being kept. The old associationists supposed the records to be writ small inside separate cells. The more modern view was that they were scored large through a deepening of the channels of conduction. Neither view is adequate.

Imagine an energy system of prodigious complexity and extreme delicacy of organisation which has an indefinitely large number of stable poises. Imagine it thrown from one poise to another with great facility, each poise being the resultant of all the energies of the system. Suppose now that the partial return of a situation which has formerly caused it to assume a stable poise, throws it into an unstable condition, from which it most easily returns to equilibrium by reassuming the former poise. Such a system would exhibit the phenomena of memory; but it would keep no records though appearing to do so. The appearance would be due merely to the extreme accuracy and sensitiveness of the system and the delicacy of its balances. Its state on the later occasion would appear to be a revival of its state on the former, but this would not be the case any more than a cumulus cloud this evening is a revival of those which decorated the heavens last year.

This imaginary construction can be made more concrete by imagining a solid with a large number of facets upon any one of which it can rest. If we try to balance it upon one of its coigns or ridges it settles down upon the nearest facet. In the case of the neural system we are trying to suggest each stable poise has been determined by a definite set, or better, context of conditions. Membership of this context is what corresponds to nearness to a facet. The partial return of the context causes the system to behave as though conditions were present which are not, and this is what is essential in memory.

That this suggestion in the form here presented is unsatisfactory and incomplete is evident. It is wildly conjectural no doubt, but so are the Archival and Pathway Theories. Yet it does avoid the chief deficiencies of those theories, it does suggest why only some conjunctions of experiences become ‘associated’, those namely which yield a stable poise. And it suggests why a thing should be recognised as the same though appearing in countless different aspects; every time it appears different conditions occur which, none the less, lead to one and the same stable poise, as the polyhedron we imagined may settle down on one and the same facet from all the surrounding ridges.