and yet not be able to recall the color of their hair or of their eyes.
Under ordinary circumstances, indeed, frequent repetitions are indispensable in order to make possible the reproduction of a given content. Vocabularies, discourses, and poems of any length cannot be learned by a single repetition even with the greatest concentration of attention on the part of an individual of very great ability. By a sufficient number of repetitions their final mastery is ensured, and by additional later reproductions gain in assurance and ease is secured.
Left to itself every mental content gradually loses its capacity for being revived, or at least suffers loss in this regard under the influence of time. Facts crammed at examination time soon vanish, if they were not sufficiently grounded by other study and later subjected to a sufficient review. But even a thing so early and deeply founded as one’s mother tongue is noticeably impaired if not used for several years.
Section 3. Deficiencies in our Knowledge concerning Memory
The foregoing sketch of our knowledge concerning memory makes no claim to completeness. To it might be added such a series of propositions known to psychology as the following: “He who learns quickly also forgets quickly,” “Relatively long series of ideas are retained better than relatively short ones,” “Old people forget most quickly the things they learned last,” and the like. Psychology is wont to make the picture rich with anecdote and illustration. But—and this is the main point—even if we particularise our knowledge by a most extended use of illustrative material, everything that we can say retains the indefinite, general, and comparative character of the propositions quoted above. Our information comes almost exclusively from the observation of extreme and especially striking cases. We are able to describe these quite correctly in a general way and in vague expressions of more or less. We suppose, again quite correctly, that the same influences exert themselves, although in a less degree, in the case of the inconspicuous, but a thousand-fold more frequent, daily activities of memory. But if our curiosity carries us further and we crave more specific and detailed information concerning these dependencies and inter-
