Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885

by Various

I have never seen an explanation of this name-forgetfulness; but it is not difficult to find a reason for it. What needs explaining is that names are so obstinate, and grow more obstinate the harder we try, while other things we have forgotten and are trying to recall generally yield themselves to our efforts. Moreover, in other cases of forgetfulness we never experience that peculiar and most exasperating feature of name-forgetfulness,—the feeling that we know the word perfectly well all the time. This last fact, indeed, seems to show that we have not forgotten the name at all, but have simply lost the clue to it.

Now, let us inquire why this clue is so hard to find. Scientific men who study the human mind and make a business of explaining thought, emotion, memory, and the like, have an expression which they use frequently, and which sounds difficult, but which really it is very easy as well as interesting to understand. They speak of the association of ideas. The association of ideas means simply the fact which every one has noticed, that one thing tends to call up another in the mind. When you recall a certain sleigh-ride last winter, you remember that you put hot bricks in the sleigh; and this reminds you that you were intending to heat a warming-pan for the bed to-night; and the thought of warming the bed makes you think of poor President Garfield's sickness, during which they tried to cool his room with ice. Each of these thoughts (ideas) has evidently called up another connected—associated—with it in some way. This is the association of ideas: it is a law that governs almost all our thinking, as any one may discover by going back over his own thoughts. Perhaps an easier way to discover it will be to observe the rapid talk of an afternoon caller on the family, and see how the conversation skips from one subject to another which the last suggested, and from that to another suggested by this, and so on.

Just this association of ideas it is which enables us to recall things we have forgotten. Our ideas on any subject—say that sleigh-ride last winter—resemble a lot of balls some distance apart in a room, but all connected by strings. If there is any particular ball we cannot find,—that is, some fact we cannot remember,—then if we pull the neighboring balls it is likely that they by the connecting strings will bring the missing ball into sight. To illustrate this, suppose that you cannot remember the route of that sleigh-ride. You recall carefully all the circumstances associated with the ride, in hopes that some one of them will suggest the route that was taken. You think of your companions, of the moon being full, of having borrowed extra robes, of the hot bricks—Ah, there is a clue! The bricks were reheated somewhere. Where was it? They were placed on a stove,—on a red-hot stove with a loafers' foot-rail about it. That settles it. Such stoves are found only in country grocery-stores; and now it all comes back to you. The ride was by the hill road to Smith's Corners. It is as if there were a string from the hot-bricks idea to the idea that the bricks were reheated, to this necessarily being done on a stove, to the peculiar kind of stove it was done on, to the only place in the neighborhood where such a stove could be, to Smith's Corners; and this string has led you, like a clue, to the fact you desired to remember.

We can now return to the question asked above: In trying to recall names, why is it so difficult to find a clue? After what has been said, the question can be put in a better form: Why does not the association of ideas enable us to recall names as it does other things? The answer is, that names (proper names) have very few associations, very few strings, or clues, leading to them. It is easy to see this; for suppose you moved away from the neighborhood of that sleigh-ride many years before, and in thinking over past times find yourself unable to recall the name of the Corners where the store stood. The place can be remembered perfectly, and a thousand circumstances connected with it, but they furnish no clue to the name: the circumstances might all remain the same and the name be any other as well. The only association the name has is with an indistinct memory of how it sounded. It was of two words: the second was something like Hollow, or Cross roads, or Crossing; the first began with an S. But it is vain to seek for it: no clue leads to it. Were it the ride you sought to remember, many of its details could be recalled, some of which might lead to the desired fact; but a name has no details, and it is only possible to say of it that it sounded so and so, if it is possible to say that.

It may be asked, how, then, is it that we do remember some names, as those in use every day? Just as the multiplication-table is remembered,—by force of familiarity. Constant repetition engraves them in the mind. When in old age the vigor of the mind lessens, the engraving wears out and names are hard to recall, since there is no other clue to them than this engraved record.

There may be mentioned one slight help in recalling names when the case is important or desperate. It consists in going back to the period when the name was known and deliberately writing out a circumstantial account of all the connected incidents, mentioning names of persons and places whenever they can be remembered. If this is done in a casual way, without thinking of the purpose in view,—as if one were sending a gossipy letter of personal history to a friend,—the mind falls into an automatic condition that may result in producing the desired name itself. Every one must have observed that it is this automatic activity of the mind, and not conscious effort, which recovers lost names most successfully. We "think of them afterwards."

Xenos Clark.

A Reminiscence of Harriet Martineau.

It is more than fifty years since I, a mere child, spent a summer with my parents in a sandy young city of Indiana. Eight or nine hundred souls, perhaps more, were already anchored within its borders. Chicago, a lusty infant just over the line, her feet blackened with prairie mud, made faces, called names, and ridiculed its soil and architecture. Nevertheless it was a valiant little city, even though its streets were rivers of shifting sand, through which "prairie-schooners" were toilsomely dragged by heavy oxen or a string of chubby ponies,—these last a gift from the coppery Indian to the country he was fast forsaking. Clouds of clear grit drifted into open casements on every passing breeze, or, if a gale arose, were driven through every crevice. Our little city was cradled amid the shifting sand-hills on Michigan's wave-beaten shore. Indeed, it had received the name of the grand old lake in loving baptism, and was pluckily determined to wear it worthily. Its buildings were wholly of wood, and hastily constructed, some not entirely unpretentious, while others tilted on legs, as if in readiness at shortest notice to take to their heels and skip away. In those early days there was only the round yellow-bodied coach swinging on leathern straps, or the heavy lumber-wagon, to accommodate the tide of travel already setting westward. It was a daily delight to listen to the inspiring toot of the driver's horn and the crack of his long whip, as, with six steaming horses, he swung his dusty passengers in a final grand flourish up to the hospitable door of the inn.

One memorable morning brought to the unique little town a literary lion,—a woman of great heart, clear brain, and powerful pen,—in short, Harriet Martineau. Her travelling companions were a professor, his comely wife, and their eight-year-old son. The last-named was much petted by Miss Martineau, and still flourishes in perennial youth on many pages of her books of American travel. Michigan City felt honored in its transient guest. The whisper that a real live author was among us filled the inn hall with a changing throng eager to obtain a glimpse of the celebrity. Not among the least of these were "the two little girls" she mentions in her "Society in America," page 253. At breakfast the party served their sharpened appetites quite like ordinary folk,—Miss Martineau in thoughtful quiet, broken now and again by a brisk question darted at the professor, who answered in a deliberate learned way that was quite impressive. A shiver of disgust ruffled his plump features at the absence of cream, which the host excused by the statement that, the population having outgrown its flocks and herds, milk was held sacred to the use of babes. Miss Martineau listened to the professor's complaints with a twinkle of mirth in her eyes, while that indignant gentleman vigorously applied himself to the solid edibles at hand. Shortly after breakfast the strangers sallied forth in search of floral treasures, over the low sand-hills stretching toward the lake (a spur of which penetrated the main street), where in the face of the sandy drift nestled a shanty quite like the "dug-out" of the timberless lands in Kansas and New Mexico. The tomb-like structure, half buried in sand, only its front being visible, seemed to afford Miss Martineau no end of surprised amusement as she climbed to its submerged roof on her way to the summit of the hill. A window-garden of tittering young women merrily watched the progress of the quick-stepping Englishwoman, and, really, there was some provocation to mirth, from their stand-point. Anything approaching a blanket, plain, plaided, or striped, had never disported itself before their astonished gaze as a part of feminine apparel, except on the back of a grimy squaw. Of blanket-shawls, soon to become a staple article of trade, the Western women had not then even heard; and here was a civilized and cultivated creature enveloped in what seemed to be a gay trophy wrested from the bed-furniture! Then, too, the "only sweet thing" in bonnets was the demure "cottage," fashioned of fine straw, while the woman in view sported a coarse, pied affair, whose turret-like crown and flaring brim pointed ambitiously skyward. Stout boots completed the costume criticised and laughed over by the merry maidens who yet stood in wholesome awe of the presence of the wearer. With what a wealth of gorgeous wild flowers and plumy ferns the pilgrims came laden on their return! Quoting from "Society in America," page 253, Miss Martineau says, "The scene was like what I had always fancied the Norway coast, but for the wild flowers, which grew among the pines on the slope almost into the tide. I longed to spend an entire day on this flowery and shadowy margin of the inland sea. I plucked handfuls of pea-vine and other trailing flowers, which seemed to run all over the ground."