Note 585 — Chapter XVI

Not that mere native tenacity will make a man great. It must be coupled with great passions and great intellect besides. Imbeciles sometimes have extraordinary desultory memory. Drobisch describes (Empirische Psychol., p. 95) the case of a young man whom he examined. He had with difficulty been taught to read and speak. "But if two or three minutes were allowed him to peruse an octavo page, he then could spell the single words out from his memory as well as if the book lay open before him.... That there was no deception I could test by means of a new Latin law-dissertation which had just come into my hands, which he never could have seen, and of which both subject and language were unknown to him. He read off [mentally] many lines, skipping about too, of the page which had been given him to see, no worse than if the experiment had been made with a child's story." Drobisch describes this case as if it were one of unusual persistence in the visual image ['primary memory,' vide supra, p. 643]. But he adds that the youth 'remembered his pages a long time.' In the Journal of Speculative Philosophy for Jan. 1871 (vi, 6) is an account by Mr. W. D. Henkle (together with the stock classic examples of preternatural memory) of an almost blind Pennsylvania farmer who could remember the day of the week on which any date had fallen for forty-two years past, and also the kind of weather it was, and what he was doing on each of more than fifteen thousand days. Pity that such a magnificent faculty as this could not have found more worthy application!

What these cases show is that the mere organic retentiveness of a man need bear no definite relation to his other mental powers. Men of the highest general powers will often forget nothing, however insignificant. One of the most generally accomplished men I know has a memory of this sort. He never keeps written note of anything, yet is never at a loss for a fact which he has once heard. He remembers the old addresses of all his New York friends, living in numbered streets, addresses which they themselves have long since moved away from and forgotten. He says that he should probably recognize an individual fly, if he had seen him thirty years previous—he is, by the way, an entomologist. As an instance of his desultory memory, he was introduced to a certain colonel at a club. The conversation fell upon the signs of age in man. The colonel challenged him to estimate his age. He looked at him, and gave the exact day of his birth, to the wonder of all. But the secret of this accuracy was that, having picked up some days previously an army-register, he had idly turned over its list of names, with dates of birth, graduation, promotions, etc., attached, and when the colonel's name was mentioned to him at the club, these figures, on which he had not bestowed a moment's thought, involuntarily surged up in his mind. Such a memory is of course a priceless boon.