eir proficiency in directly
reproducing in a recitation or an examination such matters as they may
have learned, and inarticulate power in them is something of which we
always underestimate the value. The boy who tells us, "I know the
answer, but I can't say what it is," we treat as practically identical
with him who knows absolutely nothing about the answer at all. But this
is a great mistake. It is but a small part of our experience in life
that we are ever able articulately to recall. And yet the whole of it
has had its influence in shaping our character and defining our
tendencies to judge and act. Although the ready memory is a great
blessing to its possessor, the vaguer memory of a subject, of having
once had to do with it, of its neighborhood, and of where we may go to
recover it again, constitutes in most men and women the chief fruit of
their education. This is true even in professional education. The
doctor, the lawyer, are seldom able to decide upon a case off-hand. They
differ from other men only through the fact that they know how to get at
the materials for decision in five minutes or half an hour: whereas the
layman is unable to get at the materials at all, not knowing in what
books and indexes to look or not understanding the technical terms.

Be patient, then, and sympathetic with the type of mind that cuts a
poor figure in examinations. It may, in the long examination which life
sets us, come out in the end in better shape than the glib and ready
reproducer, its passions being deeper, its purposes more worthy, its
combining power less commonplace, and its total mental output
consequently more important.

Such are the chief points which it has seemed worth while for me to call
to your notice under the head of memory. We can sum them up for
practical purposes by saying that the art of remembering is the art of
_thinking_; and by adding, with Dr. Pick, that, when we wish to fix a
new thing in either our own mind or a pupil's, our conscious effort
should not be so much to _impress_ and _retain_ it as to _connect_ it
with something else already there. The connecting _is_ the thinking;
and, if we attend clearly to the connection, the connected thing will
certainly be likely to remain within recall.

I shall next ask you to consider the process by which we acquire new
knowledge,--the process of 'Apperception,' as it is called, by which we
receive and deal with new experiences, and revise our stock of ideas