MENTAL IMAGES 25
cepts and standards, to which more detailed reference will be made later. Certainly the organization of the images into logical wholes facilitates their revival; in fact, one might say that the facility with which an image can be re vived is in proportion to the number of relations established between it and other images.
2. Inexactness of the recalled image. The revival of a previous experience in the form of an image is never abso lutely exact. It usually is sufficiently so to serve as a guide to further experience, and that is its function. If it did not resemble the original experience of all, or enough to in sure recognition, it would be useless. Ordinarily our mental images serve well enough our practical purposes; but it is certain that all the details of the original experience in their precise relations and proportions are never reproduced. This is obviously due to the fact that each impression made upon the brain is in some measure modified both by the pre ceding and succeeding ones. Wundt says in speaking of memory images : " Memory images and sense perceptions differ, not only in quality and intensity, but most emphatic ally in their elementary composition. . . . The incomplete ness of the memory idea is much more characteristic than the small intensity of its elements. For example, when I remember an acquaintance, the image I have of his face and figure are not mere obscure reproductions of what I have in consciousness when I look directly at him, but most of the features do not exist at all in the reproduced ideas. Con nected with the few ideational elements which are really present ... are certain factors added through contiguity and certain complications, such as the environments in which I saw my acquanintance, his name, and finally, and more especially, certain affective elements which were present at the meeting." 1 Another eminent psychologist remarks that besides the loss in sensuous liveliness " there take place in apparently the most perfect reproduction slight transformations of the content. Individual ele-
x " Outlines of Psychology" (trans, by Judd), p. 282.
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