316 SOPHIA BRYANT : moment may recall by association any moment past, since both have this element in common my personal conscious- ness of self. And certainly those apparently spontaneous memories do very often go with present moments that in some way or other make me vividly self-conscious. They may appear then as part of my life history when my thoughts turn to it. Their exceptional vividness in the first instance would tend towards their annexation to this content. The best examples that occur to me are certain experi- ences of brilliant scenic colouring which come into my mind at odd moments, apparently from nowhere a scene near Loch Vennachar after rain, and an unusual bit of fine sea-colour off the rocks near Filey, besides others already mentioned. I am sure I have seen finer examples of colour than these, but they happened to produce a very vivid consciousness at the time, and have, I think, for that reason become represen- tative to me of a stage of development in my aesthetic per- ceptions. They are part of my history, and thus associated with each point of my history as it occurs. This suggests the further reflexion that the work of consciousness as a ground for persistence in the effects of stimuli might be regarded as turning these effects into a life history, i.e. giving them that form of inherence in one person's experience, from which it follows that each is revivable by association when in any new event the mind concentrates on the fact of that person as experiencing it, provided that this kind of concentration was present in the former event. To the fulfilment of both these conditions the aesthetic type lends itself by its vivid penetrative consciousness. What may be loosely described as the play of spontaneous impartial memory should belong par excellence to it, even if there is no spontaneous memory strictly so called. If, however, there is such spontaneity and we cannot exclude, even though we may not assert, this hypothesis it would seem probable that a consciousness vivid in the first instance would sink more slowly towards the level where it ceases to be easily revivable. Thus our two types yield two kinds of excellence in memory. The aesthetic excellence is endurance, certainty, a fulness of detail and concrete sanity of flavour, combined with a spontaneity which is at once delightfully brilliant and erratically irrelevant. " Have I a good memory? "said an eminent divine to me in answer to the question. " My memory is a great deal too good for my purpose. I remem- ber everything, doggerel rhymes, the order of the boats on the
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