To impose on a child to get by heart a long scroll of phrases without any ideas is a practice fitter for a jackdaw than for anything that wears the shape of man.
Dr. I. Watts.
The habit of laying up in the memory what has not been digested by the understanding is at once the cause and the effect of mental weakness.
Sir W. Hamilton.
There is no one department of educational work in which the difference between skilled and unskilled teaching is so manifest as in the view which is taken of the faculty of memory, the mode of training it, and the uses to which different teachers seek to put it.
Fitch.
XI
THE MEMORY AND THINKING
Memory and judgment.
Many people freely admit that they have a poor memory. Their misstatements, breaches of etiquette, and failure to keep engagements they excuse by claiming a poor memory for dates, names, faces, facts, and the like. Accuse them of possessing poor judgment, and they are very much offended. They fail to see the close relation between a good memory and good judgment, between an accurate memory and sound common sense, which is but another name for good judgment in matters that all men have in common. Judgment affirms the agreement or disagreement between two objects of thought. It involves comparison. How can the comparison be accurate if the memory is not accurate in the ideas it recalls of the things to be compared?