"THE CURSE OF MEMORY"

A good memory is an asset of inestimable advantage, but "it is only a curse when it is allowed to take the place of real thinking, imagination and expression," said Professor William Neilson at the annual convention of the National Council of Teachers of English, held in New York.

The use of one's memory as a means instead of an end is a faculty--that is rarely used to qualify the accuracy of a person's memory per se. We are wont to esteem highly and without discrimination those whose powers of recollection are well nigh faultless, and yet of what merit is the mind that can only imitate and plagiarize? To store up mere facts and uncorrelated details is worse than useless. The natural limits of mental capacity are soon over-run, and there is no room to cultivate original thought and imagination. A machine's efficiency is determined by the ratio of the energy applied to the power ultimately delivered. If the two are identical, the efficiency is zero.

Isolated bits of knowledge constitute our fuel for thought, but the product of our thinking capacity will have little individual worth unless we learn to generalize our specific experiences and consign to memory only the fundamental and basic principles essential to stimulate original enterprise. So long as we only speak what we have heard and write what we have read our mental efficiency is zero. Although we probably will always applaud, if not envy, the person having a memory of uncommon accuracy, yet, as Professor Neilson suggests, "the modern idea is that memory is not a store-house in which to place parcels not be used until taken out, but rather an incubator in which you place the eggs and from which you extract the chicks."