138 galton.org
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Inquiries into Human Faculty
I was fully prepared to find much iteration in my ideas, but had little
expected that out of every hundred words twenty-three would give rise to
exactly the same association in every one of the four trials; twenty-one to
the same association in three out of the four, and so on, the experiments
having been purposely conducted under very different conditions of time
and local circumstances. This shows much less variety in the mental stock
of ideas than I had expected, and makes us feel that the roadways of our
minds are worn into very deep ruts. I conclude from the proved number of
faint and barely conscious thoughts, and from the proved iteration of
them, that the mind is perpetually travelling over familiar ways without
our memory retaining any impression of its excursions. Its footsteps are so
light and fleeting that it is only by such experiments as I have described
that we can learn anything about them. It is apparently always engaged in
mumbling over its old stores, and if any one of these is wholly neglected
for a while, it is apt to be forgotten, perhaps irrecoverably. It is by no
means the keenness of interest and of the attention when first observing an
object, that fixes it in the recollection. We pore over the pages of a
Bradshaw, and study the trains for some particular journey with the
greatest interest; but the event passes by, and the hours and other facts
which we once so eagerly considered become absolutely forgotten. So in
games of whist, and in a large number of similar instances. As I
understand it, the subject must have a continued living interest in order to
retain an abiding place in the memory. The mind must refer to it
frequently, but whether it does so consciously or unconsciously is not
perhaps a matter of much importance. Otherwise, as a general rule, the
recollection sinks, and appears to be utterly drowned in the waters of
Lethe.
The instances, according to my personal experience, are very rare, and
even those are not very satisfactory, in which some event recalls a
memory that had lain absolutely dormant for many years. In this very
series of experiments a recollection which I thought had entirely lapsed
appeared under no less than three different aspects on different occasions.
It was this: when I was a boy, my father, who was anxious that I should
learn something of physical science, which was
