The American Journal of Psychology (Volume 2) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: x retain easily, and are not liable to confusion. But, on the other hand, when the wax is very soft, one learns easily, but forgets as easily; if the wax is hard, the reverse is true; again, if the wax is hard or impure, the impressions are indistinct, and still more indistinct are they when jostled together in a little soul. This illustration must not be taken too seriously, for later on in the same dialogue Socrates calls it a " waxen figment," and substitutes for it the figure of the aviary of all kinds of birds?" some flocking together apart from the rest, others in small groups, others solitary, flying anywhere and everywhere." This receptacle is empty when we are young. The birds are kinds of knowledge. Learning is the process of capturing the birds and of detaining them in this enclosure. In acts of memory we re-catch them and take them out of the aviary. Plato's views upon memory have a special interest on account of their connection with his metaphysical doctrines. Perception and recollection are the occasion of the mind's turning away from the world of sense to the inner world of innate and universal ideas. These ideas we could never get from sense-perception. That gives us only the immediate and the individual. The ideas are of the essential and the universal. We could not conceive them if we did not already know them. Hence the power to know the universal in the individual proves a previous existence in which we had the intuitions of universal truths, and, accordingly, learning is but recollection.1 The metaphysical aspects of memory, however, let us avoid as much as possible. They would soon lead far from a psychological study. 1 For references see Zeller's Plato and the Older Academy, pp. 126, 407; cf. also Siebeck: Geschichte dr Psychologic. But t...