"In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important a function as recollecting. ... If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take as long for us to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking. All recollected times undergo, accordingly, what M. Ribot calls foreshortening; and this foreshortening is due to the omission of an enormous number of the facts which filled them. ... A thing forgotten on one day will be remembered on the next. Something we have made the most strenuous efforts to recall, but all in vain, will, soon after... saunter into the mind... [T]he sphere of possible recollection may be wider than we think, and... apparent oblivion is no proof against possible recall under other conditions. ... [M]ost of what happens actually is forgotten. ... When memory begins to decay, proper names are what go first ...[[wikt:common#Adjective|[C]ommon]] qualities and names have contracted an infinitely greater number of associations ...than the names of most of the persons ...Their memory is better organized. ...'Organization' means numerous associations; and the more numerous the associations, the greater the number of paths of recall. For the same reason... words... which form the grammatical framework of all our speech, are the very last to decay. ... We have ...as M. Ribot says, not memory so much as memories. The visual... tactile... muscular... auditory memory may all vary independently... and different individuals may have them developed in different degrees. As a rule, a man’s memory is good in the departments in which his interest is strong; but those departments are apt to be those in which his discriminative sensibility is high. ...[D]ifferences in men’s imagining power... the machinery of memory must be largely determined thereby. ... Mr. Galton ...in his English Men of Science, has given ...cases showing individual variations in the type of memory... Some have it verbal. Others... for facts and figures, others for form. Most say... [it] must first be rationally conceived and assimilated. ... Setting the mind to remember... involves a continual minimal irradiation of excitement into paths which lead thereto... the continued presence of the thing in the 'fringe' of our consciousness. Letting the thing go involves withdrawal of the irradiation, unconsciousness of the thing, and... obliteration of the paths. ... [T]hings are impressed better by active than by passive repetition. ...[I]t pays better to wait and recollect by an effort from within, than to look at the book again."