Thursday, 31 October 2019

'Memory represents past experience of the outer world!'

Herbert Spencer | On Memory

‘Memories are small islands in a sea of forgetting. In processing our experience of reality, forgetting is the rule and remembering the exception!’ says Astrid Erll, one of the major theorists in the burgeoning field of Cultural Memory Studies.

Well, in general, of the broad uses of ‘Memory’ in Literature, this little series would seek to highlight the use of memory to bring about or to induce a strong feeling of nostalgia,

and

the use of memory as a means to construct one’s individual identity or one’s cultural identity!

The Romantic poets have always been rich ensamples to the former!

How beautifully then, does Wordsworth define poetry on these lines! To him, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

Great minds of yore from Wordsworth to Marcel Proust and beyond are amazing proponents to this credo!

Herbert Spencer in his enormous work and probably one of the pioneering works on psychology, written way way back in 1855, gives his take on Memory in Part IV of the first volume to his two-volumed book titled, Principles of Psychology.

To Spencer,

Memory represents past experience of the outer world. Each act of recollection is the establishment of an inner relation answering to some outer relation; but as the outer relation is often a transitory one, the inner relation established in the act of recollection is often one answering to no relation now existing or ever likely to exist again; and in that sense is not a correspondence. The correspondence here becomes evanescent. From this it will probably be inferred that a satisfactory account of Memory, as viewed from our present stand-point, is impracticable.

Therefore, Spencer adds on to say that,

We recollect those relations only of which the registration is incomplete. No one remembers that the object at which he looks has an opposite side; or that a certain modification of the visual impression implies a certain distance; or that the thing he sees moving about is a live animal. To ask a man whether he remembers that the sun shines, that fire burns, that iron is hard, would be a misuse of language. Even the almost fortuitous connections among our experiences, cease to be classed as memories when they have become thoroughly familiar.

On this note, his thesis on Memory, [along with the ways in which he connects it with ‘Instinct’ using astounding illustrations galore,] would sure make this book, one of the few harbingers of the presently popular field of Memory Studies.

It is highly unfortunate that Herbert Spencer doesn’t find mention, even in passing, in Astrid Erll’s primer on Memory Studies, titled, Memory in Culture, which has  got pages and pages on the ‘References’ part, acknowledging the big names in Memory Studies, but wanting in their master connoisseur Spencer!

[If I may use an epithet to describe him much better to our generation, well, he could perhaps be called the Bill Bryson of the nineteenth century!]

In fact, Herbert Spencer’s take on memory [pages 444 to 452] are interesting insights that are so relevant to our times yet conveniently side-stepped by certain sections of scholars in the field of Memory Studies, and the reasons are not hard to find! ;-)

To be continued…

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