der of ideas, your
mental tendency will be to take the same route, and get to the same goal
again and again. Indeed, beginning with the weight of $1,000,000, "image
of law" will turn up in your mind without your consciousness of any
intermediate station on the way, after some iteration and reiteration of
the original chain.
Again, so as to fasten the process in the reader's mind even more
firmly, suppose that it were desired to fix the date of the battle of
Hastings (A. D. 1066) in the memory; 1066 may be represented by the
words "the wise judge" (th--1, s--0, j--6, dg--6; the others are
non-significants); a chain might be made thus:
Battle of Hastings--arbitrament of war.
Arbitrament of war--arbitration.
Arbitration--judgment.
Judgment--the wise judge.
Make mental pictures, connect ideas, repeat words and sounds, go about
it any way you please, so that you will form a mental habit of
connecting the "battle of Hastings" with the idea of "arbitrament of
war," and so on for the other links in the chain, and the work is done.
Loisette makes the beginning of his system unnecessarily difficult, to
say nothing of his illogical arrangement in the grammar of the art of
memory, which he makes the first of his lessons. He analyzes suggestion
into--
1. Inclusion.
2. Exclusion.
3. Concurrence.
All of which looks very scientific and orderly, but is really misleading
and badly named. The truth is that one idea will suggest another:
1. By likeness or opposition of meaning, as "house" suggests "room" or
"door," etc.; or, "white" suggests "black"; "cruel," "kind," etc.
2. By likeness of sound, as "harrow" and "barrow"; "Henry" and
"Hennepin."
3. By mental juxtaposition, a peculiarity different in each person, and
depending upon each one's own experiences. Thus, "St. Charles" suggests
"railway bridge" to me, because I was vividly impressed by the breaking
of the Wabash bridge at that point. "Stable" and "broken leg" come near
each other in my experience, as do "cow" and "shot-gun" and "licking."
Out of these three sorts of suggestion it is possible to get from anyone
fact to another in a chain certain and safe, along which the mind may be
depended upon afterwards always to follow.
The chain is, of course, by no means all. Its making and its binding
must be accompanied by a vivid, methodically directed attention, which
turns all the mental light gettable in a focus upon the subject passing
across the
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