The study just made seems to me to lead to the following conclusions:—
1. There exists an AFFECTIVE TYPE as clear and well-defined as the visual, the auditory, and the motor types. It consists in the easy, complete, and preponderant revival of affective impressions.
I have simply applied to an almost unexplored region of memory the methods of research inaugurated for objective sensations by Taine and Galton, continued by many others, and successful in their hands. It will, perhaps, be objected that the complete emotional type is rarely found; but neither is it certain that the visual, auditory, and motor types are of very frequent occurrence in a pure state. This, however, is of little consequence, the essential point being to determine its existence. Those who belong to this type will easily recognise it. I foresee that those whose memories are of the opposite type will refuse to admit it; but the members of the Royal Society and the Académie des Sciences,—being for the most part possessed of non-visual memories,—when questioned by Galton, failed to understand his queries, and would probably have rejected his conclusions. Many men have an incurable tendency to wish that every one were constituted like themselves, and to refuse to admit the existence of any departures from their type. Yet in psychology, even more than elsewhere, we must be distrustful of too extensive generalisations.
2. There exists not only a general emotional type; it admits of varieties, and it is even probable that _partial_ types are the most frequent. Here I note a resemblance between my researches and those made with regard to impressions of objective origin. It is known that some persons have an excellent memory for faces, figures, concrete objects, but not for colours or visual signs, such as printing and writing. Others have an excellent memory for languages but none for music, or inversely. Moreover, have not numerous pathological phenomena demonstrated the fact that, in a determinate category of images, a whole group may disappear, without appreciable injury to the rest?
I have not at present a sufficient supply of documents to enter on the study of the varieties of the affective type; but it is certain that they exist; that, for some, a clear and frequent revival only takes place in the case of pleasurable impressions; in others, of gloomy or of erotic images. I have obtained conclusive affirmative answers on this point, but will only transcribe a case which deals with fear.
Case 7. "I am not what would be called a general emotional type, but I have a special emotional memory—that of fear, which in me is very pronounced.... I have had in my life, like every one else, many joyful moments; I will frankly say that, when I remember those incidents in my life which have caused me great joy, I feel no joy whatever. Besides, it is very difficult to recall the moments in which I felt joyful, or even the incidents which produced my joy—probably because the representative memory has not been reinforced by the emotional memory. I do not know how this may be, and do not attempt to draw any inferences from my own case. I am only speaking of myself.
"I have tried to recall one of the moments in my life when I had the acutest sense of joy—it was in April 1888. [Here follows a long description of honours obtained by the author at the age of twenty, and the applause—unexpected at his age—of a numerous public assembly.] I have a clear and very accurate recollection of the incidents I have just been describing; I can remember the cause to which, rightly or wrongly, I attributed my success; I could repeat nearly every word I said on that occasion; I could remember (though not so easily) the hall and the faces of the audience; but I find, to-day, no joy whatever in thinking of all this.
"As regards my capacity for reviving sad recollections the same may be said as in the case of joyfulness.
"To return to fear. I have two very conclusive examples of special emotional memory. When a boarder at the S—— _lycée_ at Bucharest, I dreaded all the staff of the institution on account of a punishment they were in the habit of inflicting on me—that of confinement to the schoolroom on holidays. I remember having such a fear of this imprisonment that, once I had left the building, it was with great difficulty I could bring myself to pass the gateway, for fear of being stopped. In later years, having finished my studies, and kept up friendly relations with all persons concerned, I used sometimes to return on a visit to the Lycée, but never without feeling a kind of terrified shudder on my entrance.
"More than this: having remained three years at Paris, without visiting my own country, I returned to Bucharest, and went to see a new director, with whom I was on friendly terms. Even then, when approaching the door of the institution, I felt a sort of uneasiness which was nothing else but my old dread in an attenuated form.
"In the first year of my stay at Paris I entered my name for the more advanced lectures of the Lycée L——. I only attended them for a week. In the class-room I was conscious of an uneasy feeling; I feared something without knowing what it was; I felt a horror of all the staff, though they were full of consideration for me, and at my age (twenty-two) I was no longer on the footing of a schoolboy. What could I have been afraid of? for I might have left whenever I wished it. Though accustomed to work for many hours together in libraries, I could do nothing in this class-room. I believe this state to have been a reminiscence of my old fear—that of the Bucharest _lycée_.... Long afterwards, when a student attending the lectures of the Faculté de Droit, I had every day to pass the Lycée L——. I would hurry past it as quickly as I could, feeling the same dread as at the time when I used to pass the gateway of the Bucharest _lycée_.
“I have a good motor, no visual, and a very slight auditory memory.”
It might be said that in this case the revival is often artificially produced, and associated with special circumstances; but it seemed to me of too clear and definite a character to be omitted.
I need not point out that these individual differences in the revivability of emotional states certainly play a great part in the constitution of different types of character. Moreover, the existence of variations of the emotional type cuts short the question, acrimoniously debated by some writers, whether pains can be more easily remembered than pleasures. Optimists and pessimists have fought fiercely over this phantasmal problem; but it is a vain and factitious question so long as we suppose that it admits of but one solution. There is not, and cannot be, a general answer.
Certain individuals revive joyful images with astonishing facility; sad memories, when they arise, are immediately and easily trodden down. I know an inveterate optimist, successful in all his undertakings, who has much difficulty in picturing to himself the few reverses that he has experienced. “I remember joys much more easily than painful states” is an answer I frequently meet with in my notes.
On the other hand, there are many who say, “I remember sorrows much more easily than pleasurable states.” In the course of my inquiries I have found that the latter are the most numerous; but I do not see my way to draw any conclusion from this fact. One says, “I find it much easier to revive unpleasant feelings, whence my tendency to pessimism. Joyous impressions are evanescent. A painful recollection makes me sad at a joyful moment; a joyful recollection does not cheer me at a sad one.”
These are straightforward cases. Outside them the question above stated can only be solved at haphazard, and by a merely mental view.
3. Revivability depends on cerebral and internal conditions (whatever these may be, known or unknown) rather than on the primary impression itself. To feel emotions acutely and revive them acutely are two widely different operations; one does not imply the other. We have seen that, in many cases, revivability even seems to be in inverse ratio to the intensity of the initial phenomenon. This brings us back to the question of characters. It does not matter whether the impression is a vivid one; what is wanted is that it should be fixed. Often it is heightened by a process of latent incubation depending on individual temperament. Chateaubriand, speaking of a gamekeeper to whom he was much attached, and who was killed by a poacher, says, “My imagination (at sixteen) pictured to me Raulx holding his entrails in his hands, and dragging himself to the hut where he died. I conceived the idea of revenge; I wished to fight the murderer. In this respect I am singularly constituted; at the moment of a blow I scarcely feel it, but it engraves itself on my memory; _the recollection, instead of being weakened, grows stronger with time_; it sleeps in my heart for years together, then the most trivial circumstance awakens it with renewed force, and my wound becomes more painful than on the first day.”[107] Here we have another analogy with what takes place in the order of objective impressions. It is not sufficient to have good eyes in order to have a good visual memory, and I know short-sighted persons whose inner vision is excellent.[108]
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Footnote 107:
_Mémoires_, vol. i. p. 77. The italics are not in the original.
Footnote 108:
This has recently been experimentally demonstrated; the observations made by Dr. Toulouse (with the assistance of specialists) on M. Zola may be specially mentioned. In this case the coincidence of a somewhat low degree of sensory acuteness with a very high degree of delicacy and precision in revived sensory impression was found not only in the case of vision, but especially in that of smell. (Toulouse, _Emile Zola: Enquête Médico-psychologique_, 1896, pp. 164, 173, 179, 206.)—ED.
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I may terminate this inquiry, which is a sketch rather than a study of the subject, by reminding the reader that the facts ascertained for the other, the intellectual part of memory, have not been the work of one man or of one day.[109]
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Footnote 109:
This chapter was first published in the _Revue Philosophique_ for October 1894. It called forth some new communications, two only of which have been added to the original text. The affirmation of a type of affective memory has, as I expected, provoked both criticism and denial. My principal opponent, Prof. Titchener, has published on this subject a somewhat extensive article in the _Philosophical Review_ (November 1895), in which he reproaches me with not having cited a single case of pure emotional memory—i.e., memory from which all sensory and ideational elements are absent, and where there is a revival of feeling _as such_. An example of this kind, which should be quite conclusive, seems to me almost impossible to produce. A pleasure, a pain, an emotion, are always associated with a sensation, a representation, or an act; revival necessarily bringing back the intellectual state which forms part of the complexus and supports it. But the real question is elsewhere: Is revival, in certain persons at least, a dry record, or a _felt_ state? In this last case—and it does occur—there is the recollection of the emotional state as such.
There is another objection: Can it be said that an emotion is the reproduction of an antecedent emotion, and not a new emotion? The reproduction of an emotion can itself be nothing other than an emotion, but it bears the marks of repetition. Without returning to what has been said above, I remark that those contemporary psychologists, who study with admirable patience the mechanism of memory, neglect that of its most general conditions. Now the chief of these is that every recollection must be a _reversion_, by virtue of which, the past once more becoming a present, we live at present in the past. The recollection of an emotion as such does not escape the action of this law; it must become actual once more—must _be_ a real emotion, whether acute or obtuse.
Taking account of the criticisms, and of the new material supplied to me, I may once again sum up my inquiry thus—
1. The emotional memory is _nil_ in the majority of people.
2. In others there is a half intellectual, half emotional memory, _i.e._, the emotional elements are only revived partially and with difficulty, by the help of the intellectual states associated with them.
3. Others, and these the least numerous, have a true—_i.e._, complete—emotional memory; the intellectual element being only a means of revival which is rapidly effaced.
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