In such cases, people are sometimes seen to forget what happened last
week, yesterday, or an hour ago, without even the smallest power of
recovering their recollection; but the oft repeated earlier impression
remains, though there may be no memory whatever of how it came to be
impressed so deeply. The phenomena of memory, therefore, are exactly
like those of consciousness and volition, in so far as that the
consciousness of recollection vanishes, when the power of recollection
has become intense. When we are aware that we are recollecting, and are
trying, perhaps hard, to recollect, it is a sign that we do not recollect
utterly. When we remember utterly and intensely, there is no conscious
effort of recollection; our recollection can only be recognised by
ourselves and others, through our performance itself, which testifies to
the existence of a memory, that we could not otherwise follow or detect.
5. When circumstances have led us to change our habits of life—as when
the university has succeeded school, or professional life the
university—we get into many fresh ways, and leave many old ones. But on
revisiting the old scene, unless the lapse of time has been inordinately
great, we experience a desire to revert to old habits. We say that old
associations crowd upon us. Let a Trinity man, after thirty years
absence from Cambridge, pace for five minutes in the cloister of
Neville’s Court, and listen to the echo of his footfall, as it licks up
against the end of the cloister, or let an old Johnian stand wherever he
likes in the third Court of St. John’s, in either case he will find the
thirty years drop out of his life, as if they were half-an-hour; his life
will have rolled back upon itself, to the date when he was an
undergraduate, and his instinct will be to do almost mechanically,
whatever it would have come most natural to him to do, when he was last
there at the same season of the year, and the same hour of the day; and
it is plain this is due to similarity of environment, for if the place he
revisits be much changed, there will be little or no association.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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