Whether we think of the past, present, or future – or think in some hypothetically timeless way – we necessarily draw upon our imagination and memory, which are themselves necessarily intertwined. After all, any images at our disposal, whatever temporal frame we impose upon them, were formed through past experiences, and any past experience that we conjure is inevitably shaped by how we have come to imagine it. For as William James persuasively argued, memories capture only a small and very selective portion of our previous stream of experience: They are what remains after most portions of the stream have passed without the slightest conscious registration and other portions, briefly noticed, have disappeared without leaving accessible traces. Only these fractional portions that receive sufficient attention and leave adequate impressions can be re-activated and re-membered. And re-membering these portions, James noted, is more akin to painting than to seeing. It involves a subjectively framed re-presentation rather than a fully objective rendering of what actually happened (PP 695). (Sensory perceptions, we will recall, put us in direct contact with reality, according to James, but any further cognitions, involving images, words, and related concepts, reflect the subjective interests of the cognizer.) As a result, “all recollected times undergo…foreshortening…due to the omission of an enormous number of the facts which filled them” (640) and the “world” as we know it is in effect “an imaginary object” (689). James’s chapters on “Memory” (Ch. 16) and “Imagination” (Ch. 18), along with passages scattered throughout The Principles of Psychology, address what is involved in remembering and imagining this world, and what roles these processes play in shaping our experience of it.
The very first thing that needs to be said about James’s treatment of imagination is that he rejected any notion of a special faculty of imagination by which the mind is able to picture reality – or unreality – independent of any foundation in sensory experience. Even unrealistic fantasies, James argued, depend upon the recombination of sensation-based imagery. (He distinguished “reproductive” imagination that produces “literal” copies from “productive” imagination that recombines “elements from different originals…so as to make new wholes.” See 690.) At times productive imagination, which is to say, fantasy, may provide enjoyable diversions, as in dreaming, daydreaming, and imaginative literature; and at other times it may lead to dysfunctional cognitions, moods, and actions, as in cases of clinical madness. But whether one’s imagery is realistic or unrealistic, reproductive or productive, diverting or problematic, James insisted, along with former empiricists that it is ultimately based upon sensation. As Locke and Hume had written, images – which they called “ideas” – are simply copies of prior sensations, which are subsequently joined together to form coherent units of consciousness through the process of association. James accepted the first part of their analysis – that images are rooted in sensations – but denied that association is the initial or only process underlying mental life. As we have seen, he insisted that mental life begins as a singular and seamless stream of experience rather than as a manifold of disparate ideas from which experience is constructed, and he argued that discriminating parts out of the stream comes before comparing, associating, and conceptualizing them. This discriminatory activity is, for James, always motivated by the interests of the person having the experience.
In trying to differentiate various aspects of cognitive life, James wrote about sensations, images, perceptions, and conceptions rather than simply “ideas.” This gave him a relative advantage over past empiricists by allowing a more particulate analysis of psychological experience, though he disavowed any rigorous, unbending use of terminology (186). Even as he advanced the close description of mental states, he felt that the discipline of psychology was not yet in a position to offer definitive classifications of mental phenomena. So while he went beyond Locke, Hume, and others in the specificity of his descriptive terminology, he refrained from any pretense to sharp definition and exactitude. That makes it difficult at times to understand if and where he drew a line or precisely what he meant in using this or that word. This can be illustrated even by seemingly unambiguous comments on the differences between sensations, perceptions, images, and concepts in his chapter on “The Stream of Thought”:
The lingering consciousness, if of simple objects, we call ‘sensations’ or ‘images,’ according as they are vivid or faint; if of complex objects, we call them ‘percepts’ when vivid, ‘concepts’ or ‘thoughts’ when faint.
(239)
This seems reasonable and clear enough, posing a neat four-square set of distinctions:
| SIMPLE | COMPLEX | |
| VIVID | sensations | percepts |
| FAINT | images | concepts |
However, helpful as these first approximations may be, James emphasized in ensuing discussions of sensation and perception, and then of perception and conception, that there is no sharp, absolute point of division between any of these terms or between the processes to which they refer. In fact, he cited exceptional instances in which images are more vivid than sensations, sensations more complex than percepts, percepts fainter than concepts, and concepts simpler than images (see, for example, 743, 766–768, and 890–896). In lieu of this it is more useful for us to rely on an alternative scheme, in which all of these phenomena are seen as James actually portrayed them, as falling along a continuum, with sensations shading into perceptions, perceptions into conceptions, and images overlapping them all: constituted by sensation and then constituting the core of both perception and conception. Images, in short, are products of sensation and vehicles of perception and conception.
It bears mention that the present author’s understanding of all of this has resulted from persistent exploration of other texts and notes by James as well as careful scrutiny of statements made throughout Principles. Struggling with this matter has helped him appreciate why even exceptional James scholars like Ralph Barton Perry (1935), Gerald E. Myers (1986), and Charlene Haddock Seigfried (1990) have written so little about the relation of James’s views on imagination to his views on perception and conception. Hopefully what follows will provide a more accurate treatment of James’s views than he himself ever managed – or bothered? – to give. Offered in a Jamesian spirit, it is meant to provide a close approximation rather than definitive exposition of what James was getting at. And then, by connecting his apparent views to his views on memory later in this chapter, we will be able to explain how James accounted for the relative stability of mental life despite the ever-ongoing flux of experience.
Imagination, according to James, is simply a general term for imaginations, or more simply, images. Following Locke and Hume, as already mentioned, James asserted that images, in the first instance, are simply copies of sensations, including the melded clustering of sensations that typically comprise perceptual experience. The well-known phenomenon of after-images – the relatively brief persistence of images after their provoking stimulus has receded – reflects the short-lived, neurological prolongation of sensory stimulation, according to James. Thus, they belong more properly to sensation than perception (690–691). True images, lasting long enough to be preserved in neurological circuitry and therefore liable to recall, constitute (if sufficiently definite) the substantive aspects of our stream of thought or consciousness (609–610). This accords with the claims of “traditional psychology,” according to James, except that these more or less definite images are “but the very smallest part of our minds as they actually live,” not the sum total of mental phenomena as traditional empiricists claimed. Their traditional “ideas,” he said, are like “pailsful, spoonsful…and other forms of moulded water” embedded within and surrounded by the wider and deeper stream of consciousness, which these same empiricists overlook (246). In this wider and deeper flow of consciousness, as we have seen, are all the “feelings of tendency” that wash over and around these images as well as all the connective transitions between them and remembered images. These transitive states of feeling produce images too, but they are typically so vague, faint, and quickly disappearing that only astute observers like James have been able to detect and translate them into words. Most people fail to notice them at all (see 609).
We will review the feelings that constitute the transitive “flights” of consciousness in more detail in a later chapter. Here we will focus on the nature of the more stable and prominent images – what James called the substantive “perchings” of consciousness – that occupy our mental life. As produced by various kinds of sensation, they can be visual, auditory, motor, tactile, olfactory, or gustatory (696–714), though James only alluded to the latter two types of imagery and refrained from discussing images of smell and taste in any detail. (Nonetheless, we obviously preserve images of previous olfactory and gustatory experience or we would be unable to judge that something smells worse or tastes better now than it did before.) In addition, because words can represent any of the sensory modes and are themselves originally aural and subsequently visual in nature, images can be specifically verbal (256, 704). Indeed, as James made clearer in his later Talks to Teachers on Psychology (1899), “after adolescence has begun” verbal materials are more and more “the vehicle by which the mind thinks,” so that “words, words, words” must “constitute a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn” (91). And in fact “words are the most convenient materials for thought,” as he said in one of his lectures (220). In Principles, he put it this way:
Words, uttered or unexpressed, are the handiest mental elements we have. Not only are they very rapidly revivable, but they are revivable as actual sensations more easily than any other items of our experience.
(PP 256)
And citing research by Francis Galton, he added this observation:
Did they [words] not possess some such advantage as this, it would hardly be the case that the older men are and the more effective as thinkers, the more, as a rule, they have lost their visualizing power and depend on words…The present writer observes it in his own person most distinctly.
(256)
Given his prior experience as an artist, this is a particularly telling personal confirmation.
Clearly, this listing of the various types of imagery underscores the fact that “image,” for James, is a much broader category than implied by the term’s etymological source in optics. Images are not just visual. So it will help if we keep in mind that something like “copy” would, in fact, be a more accurate term for what James was talking about. Just as the words we use are copies of sounds we have heard, written marks we have seen, or Braille impressions we have touched, so too are other imagined sights, sounds, touches, movements, smells, and tastes duplicates, more or less exact, of prior sensory experiences.
The significance of this clarification of the types and origins of images increases when we realize that we think with images. As James asserted at the beginning of his chapter on “Reasoning” (Ch. 22), “much of our thinking consists of trains of images suggested one by another” (952). In short, it is guided by associations among images: We see a dog and think of home, hear a train and recall a trip, smell a flower and reminisce about a past relationship. Each image – of a dog, a train, a flower – prompts a transition in consciousness to something associated with it, just as the subsequent images, in turn, stimulate yet other images, and so on. All of this takes place more or less automatically. But even higher-order thinking, which involves purposeful manipulation of “abstractions” rather than habituated sequences of “concretes,” depends upon images, albeit images transformed from their perceptual into their conceptual manifestation. For while perceptions are of particular things that have been sensed, they are themselves sensory-based images that can be fashioned into conceptions, whether of individual, abstract, or universal objects, through the weaving (or ‘fringing’) of feelings and relations between and around them, as we have seen in the previous chapter. James expressed it this way: Images and concepts are “consubstantial in their inward nature,” but distinguished in their cognitive significance by the fact that the first (pure images) lack a meaningful surround and the other (fringed images, i.e., concepts) have one (see 452). In this context, he emphasized that “the image per se, the nucleus [of a thought], is functionally the least important part of a thought” (446–447). More important is the intention or meaning dictated by its fringe.
Perceptions, then, are not other than images, nor are conceptions different from images “in their inward nature”; nor, for that matter, are memories. (As we shall see, the latter are simply distinguished by fringes that include the sense of “pastness.”) Each – perception, conception, and memory – serves a different mental function. Each is a different way of relating to our world of experience. Each makes use of imagination, whether reproductive or productive. Each helps us establish greater specificity or greater generality. And each confers order upon the world we experience, as when we preperceive and categorize something that is just entering our consciousness, as discussed in the previous two chapters. In writing about this phenomenon, James emphasized the importance of what he called “anticipatory thinking” (415). This is accomplished through imagination, by means of the images at our disposal, which inform us about what to expect and help us make sense of our experience by providing templates of what we have experienced before.
So more easily grasped images represent halting places – “perchings” – in the flow of experience which can be glossed this way or that. With different interests, we would have paused, however momentarily, at different places, and we would return later, in memory, to different aspects of – which is to say, different perspectives on – our experience. But the basic vehicles of our “mental operations,” however our attention might be directed, are the images we have accumulated through our sensory experience. These operations include various forms of emotional and volitional phenomena as well as more typical kinds of thinking. As James summarized:
Memory is the association of a present image with others known to belong to the past. Expectation the same, with future substituted for past. Fancy, the association of images without temporary order. Belief in anything not present to sense is the very lively, strong, and steadfast association of the image of that thing with some present sensation, so that as long as the sensation persists the image cannot be excluded from the mind. Judgment is “transferring the idea of truth, by association, from one proposition to another that resembles it” [quoted from Joseph Priestley]…When we are pleased or hurt we express it, and the expression associates itself with the feeling. Hearing the same expression from another revives the associated feeling, and we sympathize, i.e., grieve or are glad with him. The other social affections, Benevolence, Conscientiousness, Ambition, etc., arise in like manner.
(563–564, with paragraph distinctions dropped)
James goes on to discuss avarice, fear, love, and volition as other phenomena resulting from “images of sensation associated together” (563).
These examples make it clear that we can think and experience a variety of psychological phenomena without necessarily using words. Words, as images or copies of verbal sensations, allow a certain efficiency in thought, especially when the feeling of tendency in a sentence keeps our minds hurtling forward without sufficient time for other images to be awakening. In this case, words “simply awaken the following words” (767). Even so, our thoughts – and our mental operations in general – can operate without words, running from a visual image to an auditory one, or vice versa, or through any other types of imagery besides verbal imagery, continuously arousing feelings of tendency as to what might come next. So words, though supremely useful for thought, are not necessary for it. Still, according to James, images of some kind are necessary. (Gerald E. Myers suggests that James may have accepted the possibility of imageless thought, but he seems not to have noticed either James’s conviction that “feelings of tendency” generate faint images or his reference to “verbal images.” So when our thought tends toward a conclusion or we think in words, we are still relying on images, according to James. See PP 609 and 704, and Myers 1986, 257–259. As for the fact that the past might be recalled “symbolically,” without immediately “resembling images,” James reminded his readers that such symbolic mental states stand for and sooner or later terminate in images. See PP 610.)
James’s position, at first accepted by others, became controversial when psychologists in Würzburg, Germany claimed to have found evidence of imageless thought in the early 1900s. The subsequent debate that swirled around this topic was part of the historical context in which behaviorists rejected introspection, noting that the introspective method generated different reports from different subjects and was therefore unreliable and unscientific. However, with the rise and development of cognitive psychology over the past sixty years, introspection, first-person reports, and imagery have enjoyed a strong revival (see Neisser 1967 and Kosslyn, Thompson, and Ganis 2006), and included in this revival, further echoing James’s approach, has been a focus upon the relation of imagery to memory (see Paivio 1971). Although James seems not to have had a direct influence upon these later developments, Sohee Park and Stephen M. Kosslyn (1990) have argued that his treatment of the imagination is “sophisticated and elegant,” even “surprisingly contemporary,” and that it exposes “underlying issues” and offers “interesting speculations” that should be taken “very seriously” today (183, 195). A philosopher who defends “imagism” in ways that are consonant with James’s empiricist approach is Jesse J. Prinz (2002).
Memory is closely related to the imagination, and vice versa. We have already noted that an original sensory impression must be “prolonged enough” to give rise to an image, but in fact James’s entire statement is that the original sensory impression must be prolonged enough if it is “to give rise to a recurrent image of it” (609). Imagery needs to be remembered if it is to perform subsequent mental functions; and what is remembered needs to be imagined: Memory, in fact, entails a retrieval of images. Indeed, using the broader, more traditional term for “images,” James noted that all “ideas” are “in the last resort reminiscences” (36). Similarly, the majority of mental operations, from the most basic (e.g., the perception of likeness) to the most advanced (e.g., the sense of self-identity), depend upon memory. Understandably, given its wide-ranging significance, memory is a phenomenon that has never fallen out of fashion among those who strive to understand the mind and how it works.
For good reason, then, memory is a central concern in James’s first substantive chapter on “The Functions of the Brain” (Ch. 2). After a brief review of the lower levels of the nervous system and their roles in sensation and movement, he discussed the cerebral hemispheres, then a topic of considerable ongoing research. Having shown that “the lower centres act from present sensational stimuli alone,” he observed that, in contrast,
the hemispheres act from perception and considerations, the sensations which they may receive serving only as suggesters of these. But what are perceptions but sensations grouped together? and what are considerations but expectations, in the fancy, of sensations which will be felt one way or another according as action takes this course or that? If I step aside on seeing a rattlesnake, from considering how dangerous an animal he is, the mental materials which constitute my prudential reflection are images more or less vivid of the movement of his head, of a sudden pain in my leg, of a state of terror, a swelling of the limb, a chill, delirium, unconsciousness, etc., etc., and the ruin of my hopes. But all these images are constructed out of my past experiences. They are reproductions of what I have felt or witnessed. They are, in short, remote sensations; and the difference between the [surgically] hemisphereless animal and the whole one [with cerebral hemispheres] may be concisely expressed by saying that the one [the latter] obeys absent, the other only present, objects.
(32)
These reflections upon the implications of current neurological research led James to conclude that
the hemispheres would then seem to be the seat of memory. Vestiges of past experience must in some way be stored up in them, and must when aroused by present stimuli, first appear as representations of distant goods and evils; and then must discharge into the appropriate motor channels for warding off the evil and securing the benefits of the good. If we liken the nervous currents to electric currents, we can compare the nervous system…to a direct circuit from sense-organ to muscle…[in which] the hemisphere…adds the long circuit or loop-line through which the current may pass when for any reason the direct line [from sensory stimulus to motor response] is not used.
(32–33)
Stored in each hemisphere, James was suggesting, are the neurological traces of earlier experiences that are energized when a subsequent electrophysiological current flows along the same “loop-line,” thus stimulating memories that facilitate or inhibit further response. As he put it, the “hemispheric loop-line” serves as a “reservoir” for “reminiscences” (33). Later, he used another metaphor (based on the latest technology), one that was borrowed ever more frequently in the following decades: A cerebral hemisphere is like “the great commutating switch-board at a central telephone station,” which allows “any number of combinations impossible to the lower machinery taken alone.” With this increase in combinations, he argued, comes “an endless consequent increase in the possibilities of behavior on the creature’s part” (38).
These conjectures fit the results of then-current research, which James knew well, while tying it more specifically to an understanding of memory and its function in higher-level cognition and action. No animal without the capacity lent by cerebral hemispheres, he asserted, “can deliberate, pause, postpone, nicely weigh one motive against another, or compare” (33). These processes, so typical of humans, provide obvious advantages, starting with such evolutionarily relevant activities as the acquisition of food, pursuit of sexual partners, and avoidance of danger, as he illustrated with his now-famous diagram and discussion of how a child learns to avoid touching the flame of a candle (36–38). Ever honest, he observed that this portrait of the nervous system, “as a mere scheme, is so clear and so concordant with the general look of the facts as almost to impose itself on our belief,” yet admitted that ‘it is anything but clear in detail” (38). Commending the “great effort” that had gone into “the brain-physiology of late years,” he urged further investigation, observing (as we have noted in a previous chapter) that “the scheme [he had laid out] probably makes the lower centres too machine-like and the hemispheres not quite machine-like enough” (38–39). Subsequent research has confirmed this conjecture (see Edelman and Tononi 2000, Ch. 4, for a contemporary “picture of the brain”).
For our purposes, the key point is that memory, like all other psychological processes according to James, involves both brain events and mental experiences. We have already touched upon James’s variety of stances regarding the relations between mind and body, so we can leave the matter there. For the rest of this chapter, we will focus primarily, though not exclusively, on the psychological processes, mental experiences, and practical significance of time and memory.
Just before his chapter on “Memory,” James inserted a chapter on “The Perception of Time” (Ch. 15). Though it stands in its own right, it also provides background for his treatment of memory. (We discussed aspects of this chapter very briefly in our own preceding chapter.) In this chapter, James focused on what he called “intuited” or sensed time, making the now-well-known point that “the sensible present has duration,” though that duration is fairly brief (573). He called this brief sensible moment “the specious present,” and he noted that it must be filled with something sensed; it cannot be “empty” (583). In other words, we cannot “intuit” pure duration. Whatever is sensed is due to some “sensorial stimulus,” James noted, and sensory stimulation “leaves some latent activity behind it [in the nervous system] which only gradually passes away” (597). (“After-images,” as previously mentioned, are a consequence of this gradual passing away.) The duration of the moment – of the sensible present – varies according to the time it takes for a particular instance of neurological activation to die out, so “it would be rash,” James concluded, “to say definitely just how many seconds long this specious present must needs be.” Neurological processes, after all, “fade ‘asymptotically,’ and the distinctly intuited present merges into a penumbra of mere dim recency before it turns into the past.” Still, to put some bounds on the notion, James indicated that both experience and experiment suggest that the duration of “the specious present” is somewhere between “a few seconds” and “probably not more than a minute,” with the very recent past seamlessly melding into a distinct feeling of the “near past.” To go further back than this “near past” is to enter into the genuine past that can no longer be directly “sensed” and must instead be “reproduced” or “conceived” (598).
It is from the direct experience of “the specious present,” with “its content perceived as having one part earlier and the other part later,” that we get our “original intuition of time,” James said. When it comes to thinking of what is genuinely past, we must use a concept of time derived from this more immediate perception of time. So it is that “longer times are conceived by adding, shorter ones by dividing, portions of this vaguely bounded unit” of “the specious present” (603). Our only way of knowing time precisely and accurately, James observed, is
by counting, or noticing the clock, or through some other symbolic conception. When the times exceed hours or days, the conception is absolutely symbolic. We think of the amount we mean either solely as a name, or by running over a few salient dates therein, with no pretence of imagining the full durations that lie between them. No one has anything like a perception of the greater length of the time between now and the first century than of that between now and the tenth…It is but dates and events representing time, their abundance symbolizing its length.
(586)
So much for the perception and conception of time itself, except to mention that James made a number of interesting observations as he rounded out his discussion of the experience of time: that “the feeling of past time is a present feeling” (590); that “a succession of feelings…is not a feeling of succession” (591); that “the reproduction of an event, after it has…dropped out of the rearward end of the specious present, is an entirely different psychic fact from its direct perception in the specious present” (593); that “we have every reason to think that creatures may possibly differ enormously in the amounts of duration which they intuitively feel” (601); that “we must admit the possibility that to some extent the variations of time-estimate between youth and age, and the excitement and ennui [of living],” are due to “brain-change” (603); and – on the philosophical front – that “Kant’s notion of an intuition of objective time as an infinite necessary continuum has nothing to support it” (603).
At the start of his chapter on “Memory” (Ch. 16), James made it clear that he was now dealing with “secondary memory,” or what he called “memory proper,” as opposed to the “primary memory” involved in one’s brief awareness of a passing moment. (Today’s psychologists acknowledge the same distinction as “short-term” and “long-term” memory.) James’s “primary” (i.e., short-term) memory has to do with the shortest possible remembered time, a brief awareness of “a substantive state” of consciousness that lasts a minimal amount of time: not long enough to be registered more permanently as a memory proper (i.e., in long-term memory). It is subsequently “absolutely unremembered.” (Contemporaneous “transitive states” are typically too faint and fleeting, according to James, to register even momentarily in primary memory.) James hastened to add that “a momentary state of consciousness,” though forever forgotten, may nonetheless be significant in determining “the transition of our thinking in a vital way” or in deciding “our action” at that particular moment (606). But such momentary awareness, not subject to recall, cannot be effective later, he claimed: “The EFFECTIVE consciousness of our states” is always the “after-consciousness” of true memory (606). About such memory, he wrote:
An object which is recollected, in the proper sense of that term, is one which has been absent from consciousness altogether, and now revives anew. It is brought back, recalled, fished up, so to speak, from a reservoir in which, with countless other objects, it lay buried and lost from view.
(608)
As we have already seen, “the first condition which makes a thing susceptible of recall after it has been forgotten,” according to James, “is that the original impression of it should have been prolonged enough to give rise to a recurrent image of it, as distinguished from one of those primary after-images” (609). But this condition, though necessary for recall, is not sufficient. A second condition is that the remembered fact “be expressly referred to the past,” that it be “thought as in the past” (611). And even that is not enough. “Memory requires more than mere dating of a fact in the past. It must be dated in my past. In other words, I must think that I directly experienced its occurrence,” which can happen only if it is accompanied by the same kind of “warmth and intimacy” that typifies “all experiences ‘appropriated’ by the thinker as his own” (612). (James had discussed the “warmth and intimacy” of personal experience in his earlier chapter on “The Consciousness of Self.” We will review that chapter and its treatment of the “warmth and intimacy” of personal thoughts and memories later in this book.)
What this means is that the image or copy of something previously experienced and now remembered “is really not there at all in that simple shape, as a separate ‘idea.’” Rather it is encompassed within “a very complex representation, that of the fact to be recalled plus its associates, the whole forming one ‘object’…known in one integral pulse of consciousness…and demanding probably a vastly more intricate brain-process than that on which any simple sensorial image depends” (612). It is in this way that the remembered past is not entirely coextensive with the experience of the specious moment that is being recalled. Combined with the selectivity of the original experience itself, that means, as James fully realized, that the reconstruction and conceptualization of the past can be – indeed, must be – incomplete…and sometimes even glaringly idiosyncratic and inaccurate. This accounts for the vagaries of eye-witness testimony, a significant concern in our own time, which James identified very clearly. Having noted that “false memories are by no means rare occurrences in most of us” and that “the content of a dream will oftentimes insert itself into the stream of real life in a most perplexing way,” James made the following observations:
The most frequent source of false memory is the accounts we give to others of our experiences. Such accounts we almost always make both more simple and more interesting than the truth. We quote what we should have said or done, rather than what we really said or did; and in the first retelling we may be fully aware of the distinction. But ere long the fiction expels the reality from memory and reigns in its stead alone. This is one great source of the fallibility of testimony meant to be quite honest. Especially where the marvellous is concerned, the story takes a tilt that way, and the memory follows the story.
(353)
This and other considerations led James to conclude that memory is “the feeling of belief in a peculiar complex object.” It need not be a false belief, of course, but like all beliefs, it is a mental state in which a “represented object” that is “connected either mediately or immediately with our present sensations or emotional activities tends to be believed in as a reality” (613). It is “the sense of a peculiar active relation in it to ourselves” that “gives to an object the characteristic quality of reality.” In contrast, “a merely imagined past event differs from a recollected one…in the absence of this peculiar feeling relation.” (In fact, James said that an imagined past event differs “only” in the absence of this peculiar feeling relation.) Once again we see how the fringe surrounding an image conveys, according to James, a distinctive meaning or reference. In summing up, James wrote that “the object of memory is only an object imagined in the past (usually very completely imagined there) to which the emotion of belief adheres” (614).
In returning to the topic of the causes of memory, first broached in his chapter on “The Functions of the Brain” (Ch. 2), James reduced the prerequisites of memory to “retention” and “recollection” of “the remembered fact” and then attributed both of these factors to what he now called “the law of habit in the nervous system.” Referring to memory as a “psychophysiological phenomenon” (616), he underscored that the physiological cause “works as it does” psychologically through “the ‘association of ideas’” (614). The physiological dimension of the equation, James said, depends “partly on the number and partly on the persistence” of “brain-paths,” which may vary from person to person (620–621). And since brain-paths cannot be directly modified, but only modified in the course of creating associations, it is only from the psychological side that intentional change in the form of higher-quality memory, or enhanced learning, can take place: “The more other facts a fact is associated with in the mind, the better possession of it our memory retains” (622). Regarding “this forming of associations with a fact, what is it,” James asked, “but thinking about the fact as much as possible?” (623). As he also noted later in urging teachers to appeal to related and interesting phenomena when inducing students to assimilate information, “the great memory for facts which a Darwin and a Spencer reveal in their books is not incompatible with the possession on their part of a brain with only a middling degree of physiological retentiveness” (623; see TTP 60). Although a person’s “native [physiological] retentiveness” is “unchangeable” (624), the number of associations one makes with the things to be memorized is not only changeable but under our control. The need to spend time forming associations, each of which can act as a cue to memory, is the best argument, James added, for considering cramming “a bad mode of study” (623).
So a person’s “GENERAL retentiveness” as determined by inborn brain-capacity is, assuming sufficient capacity, typically less important than “elaborating the associates of each of the things to be remembered” (624). Application, comparison, and recognition of connections and parallels among the things to be learned, James argued, are at the heart of good pedagogy and good learning in general. “Better remembering” is a matter of “better thinking” (625). It isn’t that practice increases one’s capacity for learning; it’s that it multiplies the number of connections through which one can arouse a memory.
After stating that “all improvement of memory consists, then, in the improvement of one’s habitual methods of recording facts” (628), James went on to discuss what he called mechanical methods (e.g., intensification, prolongation, and analysis into parts), judicious methods (e.g., logical classification into categories), and ingenious methods (e.g., various memory systems or gimmicks) for remembering things (628–630). He also proffered the general proposition that, other things being equal, “an impression is remembered the better in proportion as it is…more recent…more attended to…more often repeated” (630). All of this is as relevant today as it was in 1890. In fact, James’s Principles and especially its derivative Talks to Teachers on Psychology (1899) contributed significantly to the professionalization of teaching, to the still vigorous study of the processes of learning, and to the exploration of means toward optimal understanding and retention. It is not by chance that the behaviorists who followed James focused on associative learning. The shame is that they eviscerated James’s more comprehensive and more cognitive views by emphasizing only the association of directly observable stimuli and responses.
James completed his chapter on memory by reviewing the “exact measurements of memory” coming from experimental studies like those conducted by Hermann Ebbinghaus in Germany (636–638); discussing the practical value of selective forgetting, lest we would remember everything and “on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing” (640); suggesting that “all recollected times undergo…foreshortening…due to the omission of an enormous number of the facts which filled them” (640); admitting that “there are many regularities in the process of forgetting which are as yet unaccounted for” (641); considering what “the disease called aphasia,” i.e., disturbances in linguistic performance, can tell us about memory (644); noting that “things are impressed better by active than by passive repetition” (646); and concluding with a statement of metaphysical wonder at the very fact of remembering (647), of brains giving rise to “knowing consciousness” (647), and of the past being known “when certain brain-conditions are fulfilled” (649).
Throughout subsequent chapters of The Principles of Psychology, imagination and memory pop up continuously, both expectedly and unexpectedly. To give but two examples of the unexpected, the chapter on “The Emotions” (Ch. 25) contains a very interesting discussion of the unique relation between emotion and memory, and the chapter on “Will” (Ch. 26) includes an argument that images play a fundamental role in the execution of willful action. We will treat these matters when we look into these topics.
Throughout the foregoing treatment of James’s views on imagination and memory, the generic term “image” has been used, as James himself used it, to stand for a variety of phenomena. In fact, “image” often meant, for James, a compound of images, as when images of arms, legs, head, etc., are combined into an image of a human body, or when one image leads to another and to another and to another to constitute an episodic memory of an entire event. Something like this compounding of images was involved, too, when James spoke about the importance of “the imagination,” intending a more global kind of imaging, including verbal, visual, and other forms of imagery acting together to create, say, an experience of understanding or empathy. For instance, in Principles he spoke up against critics “who have failed to take [a particular statement or theory] into their imaginations” before they begin to criticize it (134). (Similarly, later in life, when he turned his attention more specifically to philosophical argumentation, he sometimes complained about readers who failed to position themselves within the “centre” of his or someone else’s “vision” before arguing against it. For example, see PU 117.) Such failure of imagination, he believed, destroyed the prospects for genuine intellectual exchange, just as the failure to imagine what it is like to be someone else, and more specifically to see and feel things as someone “other” than oneself does, eliminates the opportunity for sympathetic appreciation of others, not to mention the possibility of enlarging and enriching one’s own sensibilities (see BHB).
Truth be told, the patchwork of “images” needed to describe, much less explain, complicated mental states or human situations would be cumbersome at best, if one insisted on sticking literally to the details of James’s psychology. Such descriptions and explanations would feel too “elemental,” too built-up from the bottom, as perhaps they had to be at that time, given the state of knowledge (though one can wonder if speaking of “engrams” or “encoding,” as done more recently, fully remedies the situation). Of course, the addition of emotional factors in the fringes surrounding images, upon which James would have insisted, would smooth some of the disjunctions between images and eliminate some of the fragmentary feel of this form of explication. Nevertheless, the sense of somewhat artificial compounding of parts to achieve a foregone result would probably remain and would still bother us, as it may have bothered James himself, who liked to think in terms of ongoing processes and experiential wholes. All one can say is that the part-to-whole strategy that he employed in these matters was a consequence of his mission to reinvigorate the empirical approach to psychology, so far as possible in his time.
The point, returning to James’s own behest, is that it is important for us to see what James was getting at before criticizing how he tried to get there. From today’s perspective, he was clearly right in his general approach – e.g., right in connecting imagery and memory to the brain – as well as ahead of his time in noting many other things, including the fact that intentional mental activity (consciously “associating images,” in his terminology) can impact upon arrangements in the brain (as we now acknowledge based on research with guided imagery and meditation). And after decades of behaviorist derailment, we can now see that James was on the right track, to which psychologists have only recently returned, armed with more advanced knowledge of the nervous system and more sophisticated techniques for its further exploration. Reflecting on the kind of experimentation on learning and memory that was typical in previous decades, one leading psychologist commented in 1987 that “in order to make an appropriate theoretical advance” after the long winter of behaviorist hegemony, it was necessary “to do some of the psychologizing of the sort that William James had done and to retreat to more commonsense observations made in a richer and more natural context” (Hilgard 1987, 217).
It is ironical that James’s tendency to reduce topics to core ideas and basic issues left a gap at times between his psychological analyses and the actual human experience that he sought to explain as well as describe. But he felt confident – and we can acknowledge – that his analyses of both imagination and memory elucidated many issues that had been overlooked, simplified, or misconstrued by others. Even though many aspects of what he wrote could be found in the work of his contemporaries, he brought them all together in his distinctly thoughtful, creative, and elegant way, mixing in some of his own unique observations and metaphors. And as regards the basic concepts that still orient research in these fields, it is only fair to note that when psychologists speak today of “codes” instead of “images,” “storage” instead of “retention,” “retrieval” instead of “recollection,” “sensory memory” instead of “primary memory,” and the movement of “information” through “synaptic receptors” rather than the flow of “currents” through “brain-paths,” we have good reason to hear echoes of James’s Principles of Psychology.