of shared memories, anecdotes, jokes and stories would emerge. The flow – the flood – soon became unstoppable. It was quite unlike anything Marisse or her colleagues had heard before, and the memories had a knock-on or chain-reaction effect, each memory setting off another. Sometimes, it seemed, the evenings would explode into a party, a memory party.
This was the starting point for a brilliant MA dissertation on oral history, old age and community memory: Wash Day and Bath Night: Uncovering Women’s Reminiscences (2003). What did it demonstrate? Certainly that Marisse was a very good researcher, and knew how to wait, how to listen, and how to gain trust, like all good potential biographers. But also that memory and forgetting are subject to the law of association.
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The concept of the association of ideas is at least as old as Aristotle in the fourth century BC. The argument was taken up by Hobbes and Pascal, and later elaborated by David Hume in his Treatise on Human Nature (1738). Hume suggested that ideas were naturally linked by three qualities: ‘resemblance, contiguity in time or place, and cause and effect’. But it took an eighteenth-century doctor to transform these metaphysics into a scientific theory of memory.
One of the great, forgotten books of English Romanticism is David Hartley’s Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty and His Expectations, first published in 1749. Hartley was a successful physician who turned his hand to philosophy and psychology. Born in Yorkshire, he practised largely in London and Bath, where he developed a theory of consciousness based on his own medical observations of his patients. Hartley’s great originality was to consider memory primarily as a physiological process. It was something that occurred not only in the ‘mind’, but physically in the structure of the brain. Combining the empirical philosophy of Locke with his own views of the human nervous system, he argued that all memories were formed by ‘clusters’ or sequences of associated impressions and ideas. These were physiologically encoded in the brain in an enormous network of medullary ‘vibrations’, or smaller ‘vibratiuncles’, similar to electrical impulses moving through the brain tissue or ‘medullary substance’.
Although Hartley had not carried out dissections of the cerebral cortex, and had no effective map of the human brain (as we do today), his theories strikingly anticipate much speculative modern neuroscience. For example, Francis Crick’s study The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994), with its characteristically provocative subtitle The Scientific Search for the Soul, proposes ‘40-Herz oscillations’ within the brain, and ‘reverberations’ within the cortex, as the possible basis of human consciousness: ‘Consciousness depends crucially on thalmic connections within the cortex. It exists only if certain cortical areas have reverberatory circuits … that project strongly enough to produce significant reverberations.’
In their most basic form Hartley’s associative clusters were linked to simple impressions of pleasure or pain, but they eventually organised themselves hierarchically. They evolved into all the higher forms of remembered knowledge, learning and reason. They evolved into notions of imagination, ambition, conscience and love. They even evolved into a belief in God, which Hartley called ‘theopathy’.
Hartley was a philanthropist, a vegetarian, a Christian and a believer in a mystical kind of Paradise. Yet in effect he was putting forward a theory of the entirely physical or ‘material’ evolution of the human brain. He saw no sign of the traditional division between mind and body. He detected no separate interjection of a ‘spirit’, a ‘divine spark’ or a soul. Memory was a form of electrical or chemical motion. As he put it in his famous Proposition 90: ‘All our voluntary powers are of the nature of Memory.’
Hartley also had an unusual theory of dreams. Far from being coded messages from the unconscious, they were simply part of the brain’s system of waste disposal. When we dream, we abandon the useless memories and associations of the day. Dreaming is a functional form of forgetting, which prevents the machinery of the brain from becoming overloaded. Without forgetfulness, we would become mad: ‘The wildness of our dreams seems to be of singular use to us, by interrupting and breaking the course of our associations. For if we were always awake, some accidental associations would be so cemented by continuance, as that nothing could afterwards disjoin them; which would be madness.’
These ideas strongly attracted the eighteenth-century scientist and free-thinker Joseph Priestley. Priestley was fascinated by various forms of chemical and electrical energy, and suspected that the human brain contained both. (He had a taste for daring innovations, and was the first to isolate, though not to identify, oxygen gas consumed in combustion.) In 1774 he edited a new edition of Hartley’s Observations with his own Preface. ‘Such a theory of the human mind … contains a new and most extensive science,’ he wrote. ‘It will be like entering upon a new world, affording inexhaustible matter for curious and useful speculation.’
But others were profoundly shocked. Thomas Reid, a Professor of Moral Philosophy from Edinburgh, observed that ‘the tendency of Hartley’s system is to make all the operations of the mind mere mechanism, dependent on the laws of matter and motion’. The horrific idea of human memory as a ‘mere mechanism’ inspired Reid to unleash a superb passage of polemic science fiction in his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785): ‘If one should tell of a telescope so exactly made as to have the power of feeling; of a whispering gallery that had the power of hearing; of a cabinet so nicely framed as to have the power of memory; or of a machine so delicate as to feel pain when it was touched; such absurdities are so shocking to common sense that they would not find belief even among savages …’
It does not weaken Reid’s metaphysical outrage to observe that three hundred years later, most of these ‘absurd’ and incredible machines do exist. Certainly one could argue that the laparoscope (introducing carbon-fibre optics within the body), the mobile phone, the desktop computer and the MRI scanner demonstrate respectively many of the impossible features Reid describes.
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More surprisingly, Hartley’s Observations deeply impressed a Romantic poet. In his extraordinary effusion of 1796 entitled ‘Religious Musings’ (a sort of intellectual tour d’horizon written at the age of twenty-three), Coleridge grouped David Hartley with Newton and Priestley as one of the three visionary English scientists who had truly glimpsed a ‘renovated Earth’. He described Hartley as the ‘wisest’ among scientific thinkers, who had fearlessly explored the human mind, and become (in a prophetic image)
… The first who marked the ideal tribes
Up the fine fibres through the sentient brain.
Many of Coleridge’s most subtle early poems, such as ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1798), with its complex patterns of memory association, are explorations of Hartley’s theories. Like a memory box, this poem contains a series of physical objects and sensations – an owl’s cry, a flickering fire, a baby’s cradle, the sound of church bells – which reverberate into an ever-expanding orchestration of memories. These also produce, like complex harmonies, several layers of past and future identity. The adult Coleridge becomes a child again; while the child remembers he has become a father; and the father blesses the child. It is no coincidence that the actual baby in this poem is Coleridge’s eldest son, Hartley, born near Bristol in 1796 and named in honour of the philosopher-doctor.
Coleridge’s later Notebooks have many passages exploring the phenomenon of memory association, such as those connected with his beloved ‘Asra’, Sara Hutchinson. In an agonised notebook entry for 5 March 1810, when she was preparing to leave him, he wrote down an enormous catalogue of all the objects which by ‘the Law of Association’ reminded him of her – from a piece of music to a waterfall, from a bedroom door ajar to the delicious white sauce on a joint of meat. He described them as forming a powerful cluster of ideas, almost unbearably strong and vivid, ‘that subtle Vulcanian Spider-web
