Collective memory

“ The traditions whose memory it perpetuates express the way in which society represents man and the world; it is a moral system and a cosmology as well as a history. So the rite serves and can serve only to sustain the vitality of these beliefs, to keep them from being effaced from memory and, in sum, to revivify the most essential elements of the collective consciousness. Through it, the group periodically renews the sentiment which it has of itself and of its unity; at the same time, individuals are strengthened in their social natures. ”

“ Yesterday is a temple whose high domes and wide walls and flaming altars other hands and hearts have built. For the individual, memory is a granary for mental treasure; and, for the race, civilization is a kind of social memory.
Consider the task laid upon memory. The activity and fruitfulness of the human mind [128] are immeasurable. Reason does not so much weave thoughts as exhale them. Objects march in caravans through the eye gate and the ear gate, each provoking its own train of thought. And the unconscious processes of the mind are of even greater number. ”

“ The truth is in these same twenty years so many stirring events, like an ever rising tide, have eftaced from the minds of the men of our generation the recollections of their youth that it is no longer their memory they must trust,—memory has a twilight of its own in which far-off recollections fade away,—but to their heart. ”

“ And as memory is the basis of our intellectual life, so a communal memory of this kind will serve as the basis of the community’s intellectual life and as a means through which it may be fostered and advanced. ”

“ The Thrill of Recollection qualities and impulses to muscular movements.
All groups bound together by a mutually related idea constitute a single "complex." Every memory you have is an illustration of such "complexes." ”

“ But this mysterious power that binds our life together has its own vagaries and interruptions. It sometimes occurs that memory has a personality of its own and volunteers or refuses its informations at its will, not at mine. One sometimes asks himself, Is it possible that it is only a visitor, not a resident? Is it some old aunt who goes in and out of the house, and occasionally recites anecdotes of old times and persons which I recognize as having heard before, and she being gone again I search in vain for any trace of the anecdotes? ”

“ Certain it is that through these our living brothers, or through the unexpected reactions of memory to racial records, the individual detects the growth within of an almost mystical sense of the life common to all the centuries, and of the unceasing human endeavor to penetrate into the unseen world. ”

“ As we advance in life, the literature which has charmed us in the circle of our friends becomes endeared to us from the reflected remembrance of them, of their individualities, their opinions, and their sympathies, so that our memory of it is a many-colored cord, drawn from many minds. ”

“ As the want of this is most deeply realized in society, so it is most easily acquired by free and rational conversation. Were the importance of this qualification sufficiently considered, it would more frequently turn the unprofitable channel of discourse, and introduce subjects which might at once draw forth, and enrich the latent treasures of the mind. The first act of the memory compares, compounds, and secures a stock of ideas, the other selects from that stock whatever may entertain, convince, or instruct others. ”

“ The common people have no history: persecuted by the present, they cannot think of preserving the memory of the past. And yet what surpassingly instructive records, comforting too and pious, would be the family papers that should tell us who our forebears were and speak to us of their patient struggles with harsh fate, their stubborn efforts to build up, atom by atom, what we are today. No story would come up with that for individual interest. But by the very force of things the home is abandoned; and, when the brood has flown, the nest is no longer recognized. ”

“ Before the mind’s eye, whether in sleep or waking, came images that one was to discover presently in some book one had never read, and after looking in vain for explanation to the current theory of forgotten personal memory, I came to believe in a great memory passing on from generation to generation. ”

“ Moreover, in full and alert waking life, each system is in touch with the systems related to it. If there crowd into the field of consciousness the memories belonging to one period of life, or one country we have lived in, we can control and criticise those memories by reference to others belonging to another period or another country. If we are overwhelmed by the thoughts and emotions associated with the memory of one friend we can restore our mental balance by evoking the thoughts and emotions associated with [195] another friend. ”

“ Then we understand why the laws of association are similarity and contiguity rather than any other laws, and why memory chooses among recollections which are similar or contiguous certain images rather than other images, and, finally, how by the combined work of body and mind the earliest general ideas are formed. The interest of a living being lies in discovering in the present situation that which resembles a former situation, and then in placing alongside of that present situation what preceded and followed the previous one, in order to profit by past experience. ”

“ Law is a trap baited with promise of benefit or revenge. Conversation is the idle man’s business and the business man’s recreation. Attention is adjusting the observer to the object in order to seize it in its unity and diversity. Assimilative Memory is the Habit of so receiving and absorbing impressions and ideas that they or their representatives shall be ready for revival or recall whenever wanted. ”

“ So that he would lie outstretched with his face to the earth, rebellious at the thought that with him and a few of his own generation must pass all knowledge of human achievement, the very memory of that which had once been glorious.... Not only the memory of actual men whose fame had once been blown about the world; but the memory of sound, of music, and of 304marvels in stone, uplifted by the skill of generations; the memory of systems, customs, laws, wrought wisely by the hand of experience; and of fanciful people, more real than living men and women. ”

“ Destroy memory and man would remain a perpetual infant. Because the mind carries forward each new idea and experience, there comes a day when the youth stands forth a master in his chosen craft or profession. It is memory that unifies man's life and thought, and binds all his experiences into one bundle.
In a large sense civilization itself is a kind of racial memory. ”

“ Because we too have our share—perhaps a principal share—in that spirit of separateness which has not yet done its work in the education of mankind, which has created the varying genius of nations, and, like the Muses, is the offspring of memory. ”

“ Each path is in fact an associated process, the number of these associates becoming thus to a great degree a substitute for the independent tenacity of the original impression. As I have elsewhere written: Each of the associates is a hook to which it hangs, a means to fish it up when sunk below the surface. Together they form a network of attachments by which it is woven into the entire tissue of our thought. The 'secret of a good memory' is thus the secret of forming diverse and multiple associations with every fact we care to retain. ”

“ However the associationist may represent the present ideas as thronging and arranging themselves, still, the spiritualist insists, he has in the end to admit that something, be it brain, be it 'ideas,' be it 'association,' knows past time as past, and fills it out with this or that event. And when the spiritualist calls memory an 'irreducible faculty,' he says no more than this admission of the associationist already grants. ”

“ The warm and genial influence of Society had called into action the softer emotions of his heart, freed them from the icy fetters which long and arduous attention to business had thrown over them, and caused them again to burst forth and to roll onward in an unbroken current, bearing his thoughts to that far distant period, when, in the twilight of memory, the forms of past events are dim and indistinctly visible. ”

“ Nevertheless, we occasionally meet with some whose mental faculties have not yielded to the attacks of time, in proportion to the effects produced by his inexorable hand upon the corporeal frame, and whose society is sought by many who observe that they can, even in the years of senectude, revert to their early days, and seek to enjoy the pleasures of memory by detailing to others the scenes through which they have passed, and the points of character they have noted. ”

“ And upon no spot in the review of the past does one's memory dwell with so much intense emotion, as upon that thorny and tangled labyrinth through which the spirit wandered, 'bewildered, but not lost,' at the period when the necessity and duty of proving its own character first roused it to a sense of its responsibilities. You say most truly, that it is good to look at things at a distance, from new and various points of view. ”

“ Local memory is the ability to retain and recall isolated and non-associated facts. The vast mass of early facts accumulated in memory's store-house rests upon this emotional principle. As the years increase and the mind matures, other principles become purveyors for that store-house. The laws of classification and association become in after years the efficient agencies of the cultivated mind to furnish the data for reflection and generalization. ”

“ In fact, the total of our complexes, which, regarded as a whole and in view of their reaction to the environment, their behavior under the various conditions of social life, their aptitudes, feeling-tones, "habits," and faculties, we term character and personality, are in large part predetermined by the mental experiences of the past and the vestiges of memory which have been left as residual from these experiences. We are the offspring of our past. ”

“ Sometimes my own people showed themselves anything but understanding and sympathetic. As my thoughts wander through the pages of memory, many shadows from the past arise before me, and I {104} think of how much good, and also how much harm, can be done by a man in a great public position. ”

“ Every association that you weld to an idea or an impression, serves as a cross-reference in the index, whereby the thing is found by remembrance or recollection when it is needed. We call your attention to the fact that one’s entire education depends for its efficiency upon this law of association. It is a most important feature in the rational cultivation of the memory, while at the same time being the bane of the artificial systems. Natural associations educate, while artificial ones tend to weaken the powers of the mind, if carried to any great length. ”

“ History has been taken to mean the world looking back upon itself, and remembering things. But after memory comes experience and the reflection upon experience. In our individual lives we are not content to recall things that happened, we do not just have memories, and stop there; but we relate these to one another, and see meaning in them and work them into experiences, through which we come to see life as unity and as purpose and as a process. ”

“ It is these buried complexes, memory groups, gathered through the years of experience, that determine action in uniform and easily prophesied directions. Every individual has a definite complex about religion, about politics, about patriotism, about business, and it is the sum of these buried complexes which makes up his total personality. ”

“ What a strange, illusory power memory has in dealing with the past, of creating a scene and an emotion that not only never existed, but that could not possibly ever have existed. When I look back to my own commonplace, ordinary, straightforward boyhood, wrapped up in tiny ambitions, vexed with trivial cares, full of trifling events, with a constant sense of small dissatisfaction, I am amazed at the colours with which memory tints the scene. ”

“ While memory retraces the page of history, written in blood on the smiling landscape beneath us, the eye rests once more on the pyramidal block which marks the fall of one of the ablest and best children of the revolution. ”

“ His memory of faces, names, facts, events, circumstances and other things concerning his every-day work is the measure of his ability to accomplish his task. And in the social intercourse of men and women, the possession of a retentive memory, well stocked with available facts, renders its possessor a desirable member of society. ”

“ The society of the energetic class, in their friendly and festive meetings, is full of courage, and of attempts, which intimidate the pale scholar. The courage which girls exhibit is like a battle of Lundy's Lane, [383] or a sea-fight. The intellect relies on memory to make some supplies to face these extemporaneous squadrons. But memory is a base mendicant with basket and badge, in the presence of these sudden masters. The rulers of society must be up to the work of the world, and equal to their versatile office: men of the right Cæsarian pattern, [384] who have great range of affinity. ”

“ But that the embodied consciousness of every individual is but a part, and a fragmentary part, of a transcendent whole, and that within the mind of each there is a door through which Reality may enter as Idea—Idea presupposing a greater,20 even a cosmic Memory, conscious or unconscious, active or latent, and embracing not only all individual experience and revivifying forgotten pages of life, but also Idea involving yet wider fields, transcending the ordinary limits of time, space, and personality—this would be a better description of the mental attitude of the two friends. ”