. You
cannot remember in detail at all how you first "struck out," nor the
position of your feet and arms and legs, which you felt forced to
assume. At the time there was very real difficulty with every
stroke--each one was an accomplishment to be attempted circumspectly, in
a certain definite way. All you remember now is, vaguely, a tumble or
two, soreness, and lots of fun.

We forget details we have intrusted to others as not a part of our
responsibility. We forget the things which in no way concern us, in
which we have no interest and about which we have no curiosity. And it
is well that we do so. If it were not for the ability to forget, our
minds would be like a room in which we have lived a lifetime, where we
have left everything that has been brought into it since our birth. It
would be piled ceiling high, with no room for us, and with difficulty
only could we find what we want. As we grow from babyhood to childhood,
from childhood to youth, from youth to maturity the room changes with
us. We put off childish things. They are stored away somewhere, in an
attic or basement, or destroyed. And day after day something new is
added, displacing something else. In the case of the mind all these
things are stored and cataloged in the subconscious, and forgotten,
until some need causes us to look into our catalog-index and see the
experience again, or some association calls it back, relating it to
something new. So our discussion of the subconscious involved also a
discussion of memory.

But what of the things we must use frequently and cannot find in our
minds? What of absent-mindedness and faulty memory? In such cases our
minds might be compared to a cluttered room full of things we need and
want to use every day, but in confusion. We know where many of them are,
the ones we care most about; but we have to rummage wildly to find the
rest. We have no proper system of arrangement of our belongings. You
laid down that book somewhere, absent-mindedly, and now you cannot tell
where. You were thinking of something else at the time, and inattention
proves a most common cause of poor memory. Perhaps you simply have more
books than the room can hold in an orderly way, and so you crowded that
one in some corner, and now have no recollection of where you put it.

Poor memory is the result of lack of attention, or divided attention at
the time the particular attention-stimulus knocked. You asked me to buy
a ribbon of a certain s