In conclusion, I must say a word about the contributions to our knowledge of memory which have recently come from the laboratory-psychologists.  Many of the enthusiasts for scientific or brass-instrument child-study are taking accurate measurements of children’s elementary faculties, and among these what we may call immediate memory admits of easy measurement.  All we need do is to exhibit to the child a series of letters, syllables, figures, pictures, or what-not, at intervals of one, two, three, or more seconds, or to sound a similar series of names at the same intervals, within his hearing, and then see how completely he can reproduce the list, either directly, or after an interval of ten, twenty, or sixty seconds, or some longer space of time.  According to the results of this exercise, the pupils may be rated in a memory-scale; and some persons go so far as to think that the teacher should modify her treatment of the child according to the strength or feebleness of its faculty as thus made known.

Now I can only repeat here what I said to you when treating of attention:  man is too complex a being for light to be thrown on his real efficiency by measuring any one mental faculty taken apart from its consensus in the working whole.  Such an exercise as this, dealing with incoherent and insipid objects, with no logical connection with each other, or practical significance outside of the ‘test,’ is an exercise the like of which in real life we are hardly ever called upon to perform.  In real life, our memory is always used in the service of some interest:  we remember things which we care for or which are associated with things we care for; and the child who stands at the bottom of the scale thus experimentally established might, by dint of the strength of his passion for a subject, and in consequence of the logical association into which he weaves the actual materials of his experience, be a very effective memorizer indeed, and do his school-tasks on the whole much better than an immediate parrot who might stand at the top of the ‘scientifically accurate’ list.

This preponderance of interest, of passion, in determining the results of a human being’s working life, obtains throughout.  No elementary measurement, capable of being performed in a laboratory, can throw any light on the actual efficiency of the subject; for the vital thing about him, his emotional and moral energy and doggedness, can be measured by no single experiment, and becomes known only by the total results in the long run.  A blind man like Huber, with his passion for bees and ants, can observe them through other people’s eyes better than these can through their own.  A man born with neither arms nor legs, like the late Kavanagh, M.P.—­and what an icy heart his mother must have had about him in his babyhood, and how ‘negative’ would the laboratory-measurements of his motor-functions have been!—­can be an adventurous traveller, an equestrian and sportsman, and lead an athletic outdoor