(3) Practice a little memorizing and recalling each day, if only a line of verse. The memory improves by practice, and deteriorates by neglect and disuse.
(4) Demand good service of your memory, and it will learn to respond. Learn to trust it, and it will rise to the occasion. How can you expect your memory to give good service when you continually abuse it and tell every one of "the wretched memory I have; I can never remember anything"? Your memory is very apt to accept your statements as truth; our mental faculties have an annoying habit of taking us at our word in these matters. Tell your memory what you expect it to do; then trust it and refrain from abusing it and giving it a bad name.
Final Advice.
Finally, remember this rule: You get out of your memory only that which you place in it. Place in it good, clear, deep impressions, and it will reproduce good, clear, strong recollections. Think of your memory as a phonographic record, and take care that you place the right kind of impressions upon it. In memory you reap that which you have sown. You must give to the memory before you can receive from it. Of one thing you may rest assured, namely, that unless you take sufficient interest in the things to be remembered, you will find that the memory will not take sufficient interest in them to remember them. Memory demands interest before it will take interest in the task. It demands attention before it will give attention. It demands understanding before it will give understanding. It demands association before it will respond to association. It demands repetition before it will repeat. The memory is a splendid instrument, but it stands on its dignity and asserts its rights. It belongs to the old dispensation—it demands compensation and believes in giving only in equal measure to what it receives. Our advice is to get acquainted with your memory, and make friends with it. Treat it well and it will serve you well. But neglect it, and it will turn its back on you.
CHAPTER IX.
Imagination.
THE imagination belongs to the general class of mental processes called the representative faculties, by which is meant the processes in which there are re-presented, or presented again, to consciousness impressions previously presented to it.
As we have indicated elsewhere, the imagination is dependent upon memory for its materials—its records of previous impressions. But imagination is more than mere memory or recollection of these previously experienced and recorded impressions. There is, in addition to the re-presentation and recollection, a process of arranging the recalled impressions into new forms and new combinations. The imagination not only gathers together the old impressions, but also creates new combinations and forms from the material so gathered.
Psychology gives us many hairsplitting definitions and distinctions between simple reproductive imagination and memory, but these distinctions are technical and as a rule perplexing to the average student. In truth, there is very little, if any, difference between simple reproductive imagination and memory, although when the imagination indulges in constructive activity a new feature enters into the process which is absent in pure memory operations. In simple reproductive imagination there is simply the formation of the mental image of some previous experience—the reproduction of a previous mental image. This differs very little from memory, except that the recalled image is clearer and stronger. In the same way in ordinary memory, in the manifestation of recollection, there is often the same clear, strong mental image that is produced in reproductive imagination. The two mental processes blend into each other so closely that it is practically impossible to draw the line between them, in spite of the technical differences urged by the psychologists. Of course the mere remembrance of a person who presents himself to one is nearer to pure memory than to imagination, for the process is that of recognition. But the memory or remembrance of the same person when he is absent from sight is practically that of reproductive imagination. Memory, in its stage of recognition, exists in the child mind before reproductive imagination is manifested. The latter, therefore, is regarded as a higher mental process.
But still higher in the scale is that which is known as constructive imagination. This form of imagination appears at a later period of child mentation, and is regarded as a later evolution of mental processes of the race. Gordy makes the following distinction between the two phases of imagination: "The difference between reproductive imagination and constructive imagination is that the images resulting from reproductive imagination are copies of past experience, while those resulting from constructive imagination are not. * * * To learn whether any particular image, or combination of images, is the product of reproductive or constructive imagination, all we have to do is to learn whether or not it is a copy of a past experience. Our memories, of course, are defective, and we may be uncertain on that account; but apart from that, we need be in no doubt whatever."