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we're leaving on the abraham lincoln |
you see my friend it's an issue of the monster the notorious narwhale |
we don't know where it will take us |
but we're going just the same |
we have a commander who's game for anything |
i left instructions for shipping my containers of stuffed animals and dried plants to paris france |
i opened a line of credit sufficient to cover the babirusa and conseil at my heels i jumped into a carriage |
our baggage was immediately carried to the deck of the frigate i rushed aboard |
i asked for commander farragut |
one of the sailors led me to the afterdeck where i stood in the presence of a smart looking officer who extended his hand to me |
in person welcome aboard professor your cabin is waiting for you |
i was well satisfied with my cabin which was located in the stern and opened into the officers mess |
we'll be quite comfortable here i told conseil |
and so if i'd been delayed by a quarter of an hour or even less the frigate would have gone without me and i would have missed out on this unearthly extraordinary and inconceivable expedition whose true story might well meet with some skepticism |
the wharves of brooklyn and every part of new york bordering the east river were crowded with curiosity seekers |
departing from five hundred thousand throats three cheers burst forth in succession |
thousands of handkerchiefs were waving above these tightly packed masses hailing the abraham lincoln until it reached the waters of the hudson river at the tip of the long peninsula that forms new york city |
the analysis of knowledge will occupy us until the end of the thirteenth lecture and is the most difficult part of our whole enterprise |
what is called perception differs from sensation by the fact that the sensational ingredients bring up habitual associates images and expectations of their usual correlates all of which are subjectively indistinguishable from the sensation |
whether or not this principle is liable to exceptions everyone would agree that is has a broad measure of truth though the word exactly might seem an overstatement and it might seem more correct to say that ideas approximately represent impressions |
and what sort of evidence is logically possible |
there is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago exactly as it then was with a population that remembered a wholly unreal past |
all that i am doing is to use its logical tenability as a help in the analysis of what occurs when we remember |
the behaviourist who attempts to make psychology a record of behaviour has to trust his memory in making the record |
habit is a concept involving the occurrence of similar events at different times if the behaviourist feels confident that there is such a phenomenon as habit that can only be because he trusts his memory when it assures him that there have been other times |
but i do not think such an inference is warranted |
our confidence or lack of confidence in the accuracy of a memory image must in fundamental cases be based upon a characteristic of the image itself since we cannot evoke the past bodily and compare it with the present image |
we sometimes have images that are by no means peculiarly vague which yet we do not trust for example under the influence of fatigue we may see a friend's face vividly and clearly but horribly distorted |
some images like some sensations feel very familiar while others feel strange |
familiarity is a feeling capable of degrees |
in an image of a well known face for example some parts may feel more familiar than others when this happens we have more belief in the accuracy of the familiar parts than in that of the unfamiliar parts |
i come now to the other characteristic which memory images must have in order to account for our knowledge of the past |
they must have some characteristic which makes us regard them as referring to more or less remote portions of the past |
in actual fact there are doubtless various factors that concur in giving us the feeling of greater or less remoteness in some remembered event |
there may be a specific feeling which could be called the feeling of pastness especially where immediate memory is concerned |
there is of course a difference between knowing the temporal relation of a remembered event to the present and knowing the time order of two remembered events |
it would seem that only rather recent events can be placed at all accurately by means of feelings giving their temporal relation to the present but it is clear that such feelings must play an essential part in the process of dating remembered events |
if we had retained the subject or act in knowledge the whole problem of memory would have been comparatively simple |
remembering has to be a present occurrence in some way resembling or related to what is remembered |
some points may be taken as fixed and such as any theory of memory must arrive at |
in this case as in most others what may be taken as certain in advance is rather vague |
the first of our vague but indubitable data is that there is knowledge of the past |
we might provisionally though perhaps not quite correctly define memory as that way of knowing about the past which has no analogue in our knowledge of the future such a definition would at least serve to mark the problem with which we are concerned though some expectations may deserve to rank with memory as regards im... |
this distinction is vital to the understanding of memory but it is not so easy to carry out in practice as it is to draw in theory |
a gramophone by the help of suitable records might relate to us the incidents of its past and people are not so different from gramophones as they like to believe |
i can set to work now to remember things i never remembered before such as what i had to eat for breakfast this morning and it can hardly be wholly habit that enables me to do this |
the fact that a man can recite a poem does not show that he remembers any previous occasion on which he has recited or read it |
semon's two books mentioned in an earlier lecture do not touch knowledge memory at all closely |
they give laws according to which images of past occurrences come into our minds but do not discuss our belief that these images refer to past occurrences which is what constitutes knowledge memory |
it is this that is of interest to theory of knowledge |
it is by no means always reliable almost everybody has at some time experienced the well known illusion that all that is happening now happened before at some time |
whenever the sense of familiarity occurs without a definite object it leads us to search the environment until we are satisfied that we have found the appropriate object which leads us to the judgment this is familiar |
thus no knowledge as to the past is to be derived from the feeling of familiarity alone |
a further stage is recognition |
recognition in this sense does not necessarily involve more than a habit of association the kind of object we are seeing at the moment is associated with the word cat or with an auditory image of purring or whatever other characteristic we may happen to recognize in the cat of the moment |
we are of course in fact able to judge when we recognize an object that we have seen it before but this judgment is something over and above recognition in this first sense and may very probably be impossible to animals that nevertheless have the experience of recognition in this first sense of the word |
this knowledge is memory in one sense though in another it is not |
there are however several points in which such an account of recognition is inadequate to begin with it might seem at first sight more correct to define recognition as i have seen this before than as this has existed before |
the definition of my experience is difficult broadly speaking it is everything that is connected with what i am experiencing now by certain links of which the various forms of memory are among the most important |
thus if i recognize a thing the occasion of its previous existence in virtue of which i recognize it forms part of my experience by definition recognition will be one of the marks by which my experience is singled out from the rest of the world |
of course the words this has existed before are a very inadequate translation of what actually happens when we form a judgment of recognition but that is unavoidable words are framed to express a level of thought which is by no means primitive and are quite incapable of expressing such an elementary occurrence as recog... |
he is a welcome figure at the garden parties of the elect who are always ready to encourage him by accepting free seats for his play actor managers nod to him editors allow him to contribute without charge to a symposium on the price of golf balls |
in short he becomes a prominent figure in london society and if he is not careful somebody will say so |
but even the unsuccessful dramatist has his moments |
your play must be not merely a good play but a successful one |
frankly i cannot always say |
but suppose you said i'm fond of writing my people always say my letters home are good enough for punch |
i've got a little idea for a play about a man and a woman and another woman and but perhaps i'd better keep the plot a secret for the moment |
anyhow it's jolly exciting and i can do the dialogue all right |
lend me your ear for ten minutes and you shall learn just what stagecraft is |
and i should begin with a short homily on soliloquy |
ham to be or not to be |
now the object of this soliloquy is plain |
indeed irresolution being the keynote of hamlet's soliloquy a clever player could to some extent indicate the whole thirty lines by a silent working of the jaw but at the same time it would be idle to deny that he would miss the finer shades of the dramatist's meaning |
we moderns however see the absurdity of it |
if it be granted first that the thoughts of a certain character should be known to the audience and secondly that soliloquy or the habit of thinking aloud is in opposition to modern stage technique how shall a soliloquy be avoided without damage to the play |
and so on till you get to the end when ophelia might say ah yes or something non committal of that sort |
this would be an easy way of doing it but it would not be the best way for the reason that it is too easy to call attention to itself |
in the old badly made play it was frequently necessary for one of the characters to take the audience into his confidence |
in the modern well constructed play he simply rings up an imaginary confederate and tells him what he is going to do could anything be more natural |
i want double nine hal lo |
double nine two three elsinore double nine yes hallo is that you horatio hamlet speaking |
i say i've been wondering about this business |
to be or not to be that is the question whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows what no hamlet speaking |
you gave me double five i want double nine hallo is that you horatio hamlet speaking |
to be or not to be that is the question whether tis nobler |
it is to let hamlet if that happen to be the name of your character enter with a small dog pet falcon mongoose tame bear or whatever animal is most in keeping with the part and confide in this animal such sorrows hopes or secret history as the audience has got to know |
enter hamlet with his favourite boar hound |
lady larkspur starts suddenly and turns towards him |
larkspur bit me again this morning for the third time |
i want to get away from it all swoons |
enter lord arthur fluffinose |
and there you are you will of course appreciate that the unfinished sentences not only save time but also make the manoeuvring very much more natural |
how you may be wondering are you to begin your masterpiece |
relapses into silence for the rest of the evening |
the duchess of southbridge to lord reggie oh reggie what did you say |
then lord tuppeny well what about auction |
the crowd drifts off leaving the hero and heroine alone in the middle of the stage and then you can begin |
then is the time to introduce a meal on the stage |
a stage meal is popular because it proves to the audience that the actors even when called charles hawtrey or owen nares are real people just like you and me |
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