Memory: How to Develop, Train, and Use ItAtkinson, William Walker
Science
Memory: How to Develop, Train, and Use It
Atkinson, William Walker
Memory
Locke in his celebrated work, the "Essay Concerning Human
Understanding" has clearly stated the difference between the meaning of
these several terms. He says: "Memory is the power to revive again in
our minds those ideas which after imprinting, have disappeared, or have
been laid aside out of sight--when an idea again recurs without the
operation of the like object on the external sensory, it is
_remembrance_; if it be sought after by the mind, and with pain and
endeavor found, and brought again into view, it is _recollection_."
Fuller says, commenting on this: "Memory is the power of reproducing in
the mind former impressions, or percepts. Remembrance and Recollection
are the exercise of that power, the former being involuntary or
spontaneous, the latter volitional. We remember because we cannot help
it but we recollect only through positive effort. The act of
remembering, taken by itself, is involuntary. In other words, when the
mind remembers without having tried to remember, it acts spontaneously.
Thus it may be said, in the narrow, contrasted senses of the two terms,
that we remember by chance, but recollect by intention, and if the
endeavor be successful that which is reproduced becomes, by the very
effort to bring it forth, more firmly intrenched in the mind than ever."
But the New Psychology makes a little different distinction from that of
Locke, as given above. It uses the word memory not only in his sense of
"The power to revive, etc.," but also in the sense of the activities of
the mind which tend to receive and store away the various impressions of
the senses, and the ideas conceived by the mind, to the end that they
may be reproduced voluntarily, or involuntarily, thereafter. The
distinction between remembrance and recollection, as made by Locke, is
adopted as correct by The New Psychology.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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