roduce it
accurately in speech or writing. This may be termed the intuitive memory.
There are many applications or illustrations of this faculty. Thus, for
example, you see a book on some shelf in your library. You take in its
size, its binding, both the material and the color, and its title as
lettered on the back. All this you absorb with one glance of the eye. You
remember it by the principle of association--that is, you associate with
that particular book, in connection with its title, a certain dimension,
color, and style of binding. Now, when you have occasion to look up that
special volume again, you not only go, aided by your memory of locality,
to the very section and shelf of the library where it belongs, but you
take with you instinctively, your memory or mental image of the book's
appearance. Thus, you perhaps distinctly remember (1) that it was an
octavo, and your eye in glancing along the shelf where it belongs,
rejects intuitively all the duodecimos or books of lesser size, to come
to the octavos. (2) Then you also remember that it was bound in leather,
consequently you pass quickly by all the cloth bound volumes on the
shelf. (3) in the third place you know that its color was red; and you
pay no attention whatever to books of any other color, but quickly seize
your red leather-bound octavo, and bear it off to the reading-room in
triumph. Of course there are circumstances where this quick operation of
the faculties of memory and intuition combined, would not be so easy. For
example, all the books (or nearly all) on a given shelf might be octavos;
or they might all be leather-bound; or a majority of them with red backs;
and the presence of one or more of these conditions would eliminate one
or more of the facilities for most rapidly picking out the book wanted.
But take a pile of books, we will say returned by many readers, on the
library counter. You are searching among them for a particular volume
that is again wanted. There is no order or arrangement of the volumes,
but you distinctly remember, from having handled it, its size both as to
height and thickness, its color, and how it was bound. You know it was a
thin 12mo. in green cloth binding. Do you, in your search, take up every
book in that mass, to scrutinize its title, and see if it is the one you
seek? By no means. You quickly thrust aside, one by one, or by the
half-dozen, all the volumes which are not green, cloth-bound, thin
duodecimos, without s