THE GAIN OF FORGETTING.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LVIII, Issue 17662, 24 December 1920, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE GAIN OF FORGETTING.

burying the past. ST MA.TA.VGA. lo be able to forget is one mark of a go memory Xot to forget everything, ai C p US V L ' lat Would niea n no memory ; U; - but to for Set x 'l that is useless and unimportant and of no concern for the purpose m hand. To have " a memory like a sieve" is, indeed, not the bad business it. is olten assumed to be : I' IS the only sort of memory -worth having. The poor folk v. ho are unable to forget have made fine sport for the novelists and so for the rest of us •• Comic literature, as a famous psychologist bears wi ness, has made her profit out of them. They are unable to narrate any without making an effort to acquaint >ou with every detail, relevant and irrelevant alike. There is no perspective "i their thought, no order, no plan. u let s nurse is a good example of them Dickens and Georre Eliot have found good room for them in comers of their most exquisite pages. Listen to Jane Austen's Miss Bates, talking out of " Emma." "But where couid you possibly hear it? Where could you possibly hear it, Mr. Knightley? 01 i® not five minutes since I received - lis. Cole s note—no, it cannot be more than five or at least ten—for I had got my bonnet and spencer on, just ready to come out—l was only gone down to speak to Tatty again about the pork—Jane was standing in the passage—were not you, Jane, for my mother was so afraid that we had not any salting-pan large enough. So I said I would go down and see. and Jane said, 'Shall 1 go down instead? for I think you have a little cold, and Patty has been washing the kitchen.' ' Oh, my dear, said I—well, and just then came the note. A Miss Hawkins—that's all I know—a Miss Hawkins, of Bath. But, Mr. Knightley, how could you possibly have heard it? For the very moment Mr. Cole told Mrs. Cole of it she eat down and wrote to me.' "

Partial recall, not total, is the proof of sanity. Professor William James declares that if we remembered everything we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. " One condition of remembering," B ays M. Ribot, "is that we should forget. Without totally forgetting a prodigious number of states of consciousness, and momentarily forgetting a large number, we could not remember at all. Oblivion, except in cer--tain cases, is thus no malady of memory, but a condition of its health and its life." The Need for Neglect. In the operations of all our mental powers there is what one may call the principle of neglect, and a most important j and essential principle it is. Take sight. Were no details of sense impression received by way of the retina slurred over— indeed, ignored relatively to others —we could have no ordered world of vision. Perspective, perception of proportion, and sense of distance, would be impossible. We should have merely that sense of a flat expanse close up to the eyes, which was the visual experience of our babyhood. Experience has taught us to ignore certain features in the general impression, and correspondingly to give great heed to others; and so we have acquired a good working power of vision. So with hearing. Were all the sounds which at any one time strike upon t®e sensitive apparatus of our ears given equal notice, the world of sound would be a weird jumble. Our hearing is serviceable because we heed some sounds, to the partial or total mental exclusion of others. Wo go through the vast and varied mass of possible sense experience with the bulls-eye lantern of our attention, flinging its rays —sometimes with deliberate intent, sometimes without it—upon this, that, and the other thing in that great continuum. It is not otherwise wilh memory. Our powers of accurate and efficient recall are as definitely limited as our power of focussed attention; and any but partial recollection is as undesirable as it is impossible. If no event or circumstance affecting ns ever passed out of our keenest recollection, if all the happenings of our days, however trivial, had persistent and vivid recall, sane thought would be beyond us. It is the ordering of our memories, even the. ordering out of soma of them, that makes us sane. The mind's foreground of things keenly apprehended has a far-stretching, ever-retreating background, in which other things are comparatively neglected, while at the back of all is the great limbo oi; things forgotten. Out of that abysmal depth these Forgotten things sometimes emerge, induced by appeals not fully understood as yet; but who knows that some may not find fit and final burial there V At all events, memory is essentially selective. A Lesson for Life. Hereabouts lies a lesson for us as ws go out through the closing gates of the old vear that has beeen our temporary habitation. To forget some things in it is a sober duty. There will be no progress, no life in very truth, without that wondrous ignorance. There is no art like living, and in it 3 learning there must ever be a " leaving of first principles," if we would " go 011 into perfection." Can you recall your early lessons m reading ? You learned by reading aloud ; and certain very arbitrary rules about the inflexion of your voice and the length of punctuation pauses were rigidly imposed. Now, when you read the newspaper or some interesting book aloud to others, do you drop your voice at the end of every sentence, or inevitably keep it up at a comma, or mentaly count " one" for every such comma, and " one, two" for a semicolon? It is to be devoutly hoped that you do not. Your voice will be used and your speed controlled —if you have made good use of good training—in obedience to a scarcely conscious wish to make intelligible the passage you read. And how do you write? Do you struggle still to keep the pen sloped at the angle approved when you first were set, in faroff days, to imitate the dark and light lines of the " pothooks and hangers" that graced the head of each copy-book page? Certainly not. You adopt a manner of workmanship in such things as proves most effective. Not that these first principles were tinimportant or wrong : You have outgrown, let us hope, the need for them. You have not gone back from them, if they have done their duty by you, but gone 011. In his teaching: days. Ruskin bad a favourite pupil in landscape, a youth whose work constantly evoked the master's praise. But the young artist seemed not to appreciate the praise : commendation left him discontented. At this Ruskin wondered, until one day, constrained again to utter his delight, he overheard the ■ pupil's quiet murmur—" Shall I never ; paint like Turner?" So that was the \ trouble L He had learned, at Ruskin's I own enthusiastic impulse, to regsrd Turner as the supreme exponent of landscape art, and until he had attained Ibo height ' reached by that master-painter he would ' not rest from striving. Ihe fact that his tutor could appraise, meant that he could still blame, and to a goal beyond the reach of criticism his tremendous ambition ever urged. So may we " rise on stepping-stones of our dead' selves to higher things."' Counti ing nothing achieved, burying failures, 1 Ignoring successes, we may safely and i snnelv go on. So long as we remember j enough to keep us grateful and gently I humb'e, we may be content to " let the I dead past bury its dead," and greet the New Year as if its first day were the beginning of all things. It is not, you say : but for all practical purposes it may bo" if you determine to have it so.