Thinking and learning to think

by Nathan Christ Schaeffer

The portative memory simply conveys matter. “Its only aim, like that of a carrier, is to deliver the parcel as it was received.” It is the form of memory that enables some people to carry the contents of entire volumes in their minds, sometimes in the very words, oftener in ideas only. The rhapsodists in ancient Greece who could repeat entire books of Homer are examples in point. Some men of superior talent have possessed this power in an eminent degree. Macaulay, on a voyage across the Irish Channel, rehearsed from memory an entire book of Virgil’s “Æneid.” It is the kind of memory that shines at examinations and excites the envy of persons less gifted with powers of retention. It may easily be degraded into a slave, doing work which should be performed by higher mental powers. Hence it has been appropriately styled the Cinderella faculty of the mind. Like the girl in the story, it may be abused dreadfully by having all sorts of useless drudgery heaped upon it. To require a child to learn the five thousand isolated facts formerly scattered through treatises on geography was an exercise as useless as the picking of the lentils which were poured into the ashes to give Cinderella something to do, and, unfortunately, there is no bird from fairyland to assist in the accomplishment of the task.

Much as we may admire the power of Thomas Fuller, who could repeat five hundred unrelated words in foreign languages after hearing them twice, it is an accomplishment not worth acquiring. As an accomplishment it recalls the king to whom a man exhibited his skill in throwing a pea so that it would stick on the end of a pin,—a feat acquired after years of patient practice. The man hoped to get a valuable present for his exhibition of skill. The king ordered a bag of pease to be given him, saying that it was all his accomplishment was worth.

There is no end of warnings as to the possible evil effects of a good memory upon the power to think,—warnings that a teacher may take to heart with advantage to himself and others.

Memory and the understanding.

Dr. Carpenter asserts that when the form of memory by which children learn a piece of poetry whose meaning they do not comprehend exists in unusual strength, it seems to impede rather than aid the formation of the nexus of associations which makes acquired knowledge a part of the mind itself. In illustration, he cites the suggestive case of Dr. Leyden, “who was distinguished for his extraordinary gift of learning languages, and who could repeat long acts of Parliament, or any similar document, after having once read it. Being congratulated by a friend on his remarkable gift, he replied that, instead of being an advantage to him, it was often a source of great inconvenience, because, when he wished to recollect anything in a document he had read, he could only do it by repeating the whole from the commencement till he reached the point he wished to recall.”

Latham has well said, “The ready mechanical memory of a youth, besides enabling him to mislead unpractised examiners, makes him deceive himself. Teachers find that a very ready memory is a bad educator; it stunts the growth of other mental powers by doing their work for them. A youth who can recollect without trouble will, as it were, mask the difficulty in his classical author or his mathematics by learning by rote what stands in his translation or text-book, and march forward without more ado. Thus a quick memory involves a temptation which may enervate its possessor by suffering him to evade a difficulty instead of bracing himself to encounter it in front.”[24]

Maudsley writes in the same strain: “This kind of memory, in which the person seems to read a photographic copy of former impressions with his mind’s eye, is not, indeed, commonly associated with high intellectual power; for what reason I know not, unless it be that the mind, to which it belongs, is prevented, by the very excellence of its power of apprehending and recalling separate facts, from rising to that discernment of their relations which is involved in reasoning and judgment, and so stays in a function which should be the foundation of further development, or that, being by some natural defect prevented from rising to the higher sphere of a comprehension of relations, it applies all its energies to a comprehension of details. Certainly one runs the risk, by overloading the memory of a child with details, of arresting the development of the mental powers of the child; stereotyping details on the brain, we prevent that further development of it which consists in rising from concrete conceptions to the conception of relations.”[25]

Here is another warning from the pen of Archbishop Whately: