nd exhausted is
not likely to be remembered. It is for the same reason, also, that
knowledge acquired in youth is much more likely to be remembered than
things learned late in life. The intensity and the clearness of the
presentation also cause it to make a stronger impression upon the system
and thus render its retention more permanent. This demands in turn that
attention should be strongly focused upon the presentations during any
learning process. By adding to the clearness and intensity of any
impressions, attention adds to the likelihood of their retention. The
evident cause of the scholar's ability to learn even relatively late in
life is the fact that he brings a much greater concentration of
attention to the process than is usually found in others. Repetition
also, since it tends to break down any resistance to the paths which are
being established in the nervous system during the learning process, is
a distinct aid to retention. For this reason any knowledge acquired
should be revived at intervals. This is especially true of the school
knowledge being acquired by young children, and their acquisitions must
be occasionally reviewed and used in various ways, if the knowledge is
to become a permanent possession. A special application of the law of
repetition may be noted in the fact that we remember better any topic
learned, say, in four half-hours put upon it at different intervals,
than we should by spending the whole two hours upon it at one time.

Another condition favourable to recall is the recency of the original
experience. Anything is more easily recalled, the more recently it has
been learned. The physiological cause for this seems to be that the
nervous co-ordinations being recent, they are much more likely to
re-establish themselves, not having yet been effaced or weakened through
the lapse of time.

=B. Mental Conditions.=--It must be noted, however, that although there
is evidently the above neural concomitant of recall, yet it is not the
nervous system, but the mind, that actually recalls and remembers. The
real condition of recall, therefore, is mental, and depends largely
upon the number of associations formed between the ideas themselves in
the original presentation. According to the law of association,
different ideas arise in the mind in virtue of certain connections
existing between the ideas themselves. It would be quite foreign to our
present purpose to examine the theories held among philo