The problem of memory is closely connected with the question of the
mechanical relation between thought and structure. How intimate is the
alliance of memory with the material condition of the brain, is shown by
the effect of age, of disease, of a blow, of intoxication. I have known
an aged person repeat the same question five, six, or seven times during
the same brief visit. Everybody knows the archbishop's flavour of
apoplexy in the memory as in the other mental powers. I was once asked
to see a woman who had just been injured in the street. On coming to
herself, "Where am I? What has happened?" she asked. "Knocked down by a
horse ma'am; stunned a little: that is all." A pause, "while one with
moderate haste might count a hundred," and then again, "Where am I? What
has happened?"--"Knocked down by a horse, ma'am; stunned a little: that
is all." Another pause, and the same question again; and so on during
the whole time I was by her. The same tendency to repeat a question
indefinitely has been observed in returning members of those
worshipping assemblies whose favourite hymn is "We Won't Go Home Till
Morning."
Is memory, then, a material record? Is the brain, like the rocks of the
Sinaitic Valley, written all over with inscriptions left by the long
caravans of thought, as they have passed year after year through its
mysterious recesses?
When we see a distant railway-train sliding by us in the same line, day
after day, we infer the existence of a track which guides it. So, when
some dear old friend begins that story we remember so well; switching
off at the accustomed point of digression; coming to a dead stop at the
puzzling question of chronology; off the track on the matter of its
being first or second cousin of somebody's aunt; set on it again by the
patient, listening wife, who knows it all as she knows her well-worn
wedding-ring--how can we doubt that there is a track laid down for the
story in some permanent disposition of the thinking-marrow?
I need not say that no microscope can find the tablet inscribed with the
names of early loves, the stains left by tears of sorrow or contrition,
the rent where the thunderbolt of passion has fallen, or any legible
token that such experiences have formed a part of the life of the
mortal, the vacant temple of whose thought it is exploring. It is only
as an inference, aided by illustration which I will presently offer,
that I suggest the possible existence, in the very substance of the
brain-tissue, of those inscriptions which Shakespeare must have thought
of when he wrote--
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow;
Raze out the written troubles of the brain.
The objection to the existence of such a material record--that we renew
our bodies many scores of times and yet retain our earliest
recollections--is entirely met by the fact, that a scar of any kind
holds it own nearly through life in spite of all these same changes, as
we have not far to look to find instances.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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