experience would impress us as a new fact. This
would mean that memory would fail to link the present to the past. Often
we are puzzled to know whether we have before met a certain person, or
on a former occasion told a certain story, or previously experienced a
certain present state of mind which seems half familiar. Such baffling
mental states are usually but instances of partial and incomplete
recognition. Recognition no longer applies to much of our knowledge; for
example, we say we remember that four times six is twenty-four, but
probably none of us can recall when and where we learned this fact--we
cannot _recognize_ it as belonging to our past experience. So with ten
thousand other things, which we _know_ rather than remember in the
strict sense.

3. THE STUFF OF MEMORY

What are the forms in which memory presents the past to us? What are the
elements with which it deals? What is the stuff of which it consists?

IMAGES AS THE MATERIAL OF MEMORY.--In the light of our discussion upon
mental imagery, and with the aid of a little introspection, the answer
is easy. I ask you to remember your home, and at once a visual image of
the familiar house, with its well-known rooms and their characteristic
furnishings, comes to your mind. I ask you to remember the last concert
you attended, or the chorus of birds you heard recently in the woods;
and there comes a flood of images, partly visual, but largely auditory,
from the melodies you heard. Or I ask you to remember the feast of
which you partook yesterday, and gustatory and olfactory images are
prominent among the others which appear. And so I might keep on until I
had covered the whole range of your memory; and, whether I ask you for
the simple trivial experiences of your past, for the tragic or crucial
experiences, or for the most abstruse and abstract facts which you know
and can recall, the case is the same: much of what memory presents to
you comes in the form of _images_ or of _ideas_ of your past.

IMAGES VARY AS TO TYPE.--We do not all remember what we call the same
fact in like images or ideas. When you remembered that Columbus
discovered America in 1492, some of you had an image of Columbus the
mariner standing on the deck of his ship, as the old picture shows him;
and accompanying this image was an idea of "long agoness." Others, in
recalling the same fact, had an image of the coast on which he landed,
and perchance felt the rocking of the boat and heard it