Let us see, now, if we can acquire a profounder insight into the process
of discovery. The condition of the discoverer is, as James has aptly
remarked, not unlike the situation of a person who is trying to remember
something that he has forgotten. Both are sensible of a gap, and have
only a remote presentiment of what is missing. Suppose I meet in a
company a well-known and affable gentleman whose name I have forgotten,
and who to my horror asks to be introduced to some one. I set to work
according to Lichtenberg's rule, and run down the alphabet in search of
the initial letter of his name. A vague sympathy holds me at the letter
_G_. Tentatively I add the second letter and am arrested at _e_, and
long before I have tried the third letter _r_, the name "Gerson" sounds
sonorously upon my ear, and my anguish is gone. While taking a walk I
meet a gentleman from whom I receive a communication. On returning home,
and in attending to weightier affairs, the matter slips my mind.
Moodily, but in vain, I ransack my memory. Finally I observe that I am
going over my walk again in thought. On the street corner in question
the self-same gentleman stands before me and repeats his communication.
In this process are successively recalled to consciousness all the
percepts which were connected with the percept that was lost, and with
them, finally, that, too, is brought to light. In the first case--where
the experience had already been made and is permanently impressed on our
thought--a _systematic_ procedure is both possible and easy, for we know
that a name must be composed of a limited number of sounds. But at the
same time it should be observed that the labor involved in such a
combinatorial task would be enormous if the name were long and the
responsiveness of the mind weaker.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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