galton.org 139
Psychometric Experiments
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then never taught at school, arranged with the owner of a large chemist’s
shop to let me dabble at chemistry for a few days in his laboratory. I had
not thought of this fact, so far as I was aware, for many years; but in
scrutinising the fleeting associations called up by the various words, I
traced two mental visual images (an alembic and a particular arrangement
of tables and light), and one mental sense of smell (chlorine gas) to that
very laboratory. I recognised that these images appeared familiar to me,
but I had not thought of their origin. No doubt if some strange conjunction
of circumstances had suddenly recalled those three associations at the
same time, with perhaps two or three other collateral matters which may
be still living in my memory, but which I no not as yet identify, a mental
perception of startling vividness would be the result, and I
should have
falsely imagined that it had supernaturally, as it were, started into life
from an entire oblivion extending over many years. Probably many
persons would have registered such a case as evidence that things once
perceived can never wholly vanish from the recollection, but that in the
hour of death, or under some excitement, every event of a past life may
reappear. To this view I entirely dissent. Forgetfulness appears absolute in
the vast majority of cases, and our supposed recollections of a past life
are, I believe, no more than that a large number of episodes in it, to be
reckoned perhaps in hundreds of thousands, but certainly not in tens of
hundreds of thousands, that have escaped oblivion. Every one of the
fleeting, half-conscious thoughts that were the subject of my experiments,
admitted of being vivified by keen attention, or by some appropriate
association, but I strongly suspect that ideas which have long since ceased
to fleet through the brain, owing to the absence of current associations to
call them up, disappear wholly. A comparison of old memories with a
newly-met friend of one’s boyhood, about the events we then witnessed
together, show how much we had each of us forgotten. Our recollections
do not tally. Actors and incidents that seem to have been of primary
importance in those events to the one have been utterly forgotten by the
other. The recollection of our earlier years are, in truth, very scanty, as
any one will find who tries to enumerate them.
