Questions and Exercises
(1) Memory, like recognition, may be definite or indefinite, direct or indirect. Can you give instances from your own experience?
(2) Suppose that you were required to write a defence of cramming. Could you find materials in these two chapters?
(3) Memory fails as old age comes on; it decays, as we say, in old age; and the course of decay is well-marked and uniform. Can you give any account of it? And can you explain the course from statements made in these two chapters?
(4) Do you think that memory can be improved? Be sure, before you answer, that you have read a clear meaning into the question. Give reasons for your answer.
(5) It has been said that we have no memory, but only memories. In what sense or senses is this statement true?
(6) Memory has been described as a storehouse of ideas, as a power to revive perceptions, as a universal function of organic matter, and as decaying sense. Try to realise clearly what the users of these phrases had in mind; say what you can in their favour; show in what respects they are inadequate to the psychology of memory.
(7) Can you give instances of empathy, from your own experience: in the reading of history or fiction, in the viewing of architecture or landscape, in watching an actor or a musician or an athlete, in day-dreaming? Describe as accurately as you can the different ‘feel’ of empathy and sympathy; do not be satisfied with meanings.
(8) (a) Read Hawthorne’s preface to The House of the Seven Gables and G. P. Lathrop’s Introduction. What light do they throw on the mechanics of constructive imagination? (b) Read Poe’s essay on The Philosophy of Composition. Is the writer’s psychology sound? Do you take him to have been wholly sincere? Why? Be definite.
(9) It has been suggested that the pattern of constructive imagination might be studied in the first drafts (where the manuscripts have been preserved) of poems, especially of lyric poems. What have you to say to the plan?
(10) Has imagination, in the ordinary sense, any place in science? Can you justify your answer in psychological terms?
(11) A recent writer declares that “the idea of a centaur is a complex mental picture composed of the ideas of man and horse.” The statement is unpsychological in the highest degree. Why?
(12) What have you to say, from what you have learned of receptive imagination, (a) of book-illustrations in general, (b) of Cruikshank’s and Seymour’s and Browne’s illustrations of Dickens, and (c) of an illustrated edition of George Meredith’s works?