# The Science of Memory Fully Expounded/Chapter 6

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CHAPTER VI.
There exists in the human mind a very strong tendency to associate objects or ideas with the places or localities with which they have any relation whatever, and this principle of localizing idcas is constantly at work wherever we go, or whatever we see or hear.
We have seen that for the purpose of association, there must necessarily be two things or notions to associate. Well! in the localization of ideas the locality or position constitutes one of these prerequisites, and the object or idea furnishes the other; and these are connected in the mind on the law of proximity.
It must have been observed by most, that if any place is named in a town, county, or country, anything that may have happened there, or occurred to a person in that particular place, will be immediately recalled to recollection. Thus, if in any locality a person is met with, or anything in particular noticed, ​the person or thing so associated thereto will return to the mind when the locality is afterwards suggested. Again, when in a certain spot any striking train of ideas has passed through the mind, or any soliloquies and reflections been indulged in, on again revisiting or even mentioning the place, they will with almost infallible certainty be recalled to the mind. It must have been often noticed that the page or position in the page will easily recall the passage there previously met with. One book in a case will recall the next one, and so on through the entire number. In the same manner the whole contents of a room can be easily recalled; the table will bring to the mind the articles on it, the cheffonier and mantel-picce the same, the carpet and walls the same, until everything is enumerated with the greatest precision and exactness. These facts are all dependent on the same fixed and invariable laws,—laws which operate alike in all minds, and are only variable in degree and intensity according to the natural constitution and calibre of the mind, and the extent to which it is cultivated, and they explain what we shall understand as the principle of locality.
This principle of the localization of ideas—and the power to increase the natural capacity of the memory from a just appreciation and an industrious application of it—was noticed by the ancients, who therefrom intelligently formed their plans for assisting the memory, by ingeniously contriving places, or ​objects to act as places, to which they could fix their ideas.
Their chicf plan was to take the rooms of a house, and familiarize the mind well with the articles as they occurred consecutively in it, so that from one they could easily proceed to all the others either backwards or forwards when required. To these articles, which they termed topics (hence our word "topics"), they attached, by arbitrary association, the heads or leading and most suggestive ideas of what they intended to remember; to the first object or topic the first suggestive idea, to the second the next, and so on, and when they wanted to bring back again to recollection their subject, they had only to revert to their objects, and the ideas they had been careful to attach to them would invariably arise in due order, while cach suggestive idca would then recall the minor ones connected with it. Another of their plans was to take a large number of houses, in some cases the rooms only, from a hundred upwards, and to each of these, which were termed places (hence are derived the expressions which we still retain, "first-place," "second-place," etc.), they attached or associated by imagination, in any manner that might occur to them, the leading or suggestive words, as shewn already.
Now, suppose in some portion of a discourse they wished to repcat the following:—"Some little time before Socrates drank the hemlock, one of his ​friends, who was lamenting that he was about to be put to death innocently, was asked by Socrates whether he wished that he should die guilty." This passage might be the tenth in a discourse from which a leading idea had been selected, and on the first plan the tenth object to which this had to be attached would probably have been some such idea as vase or fire. The idea in the above passage that would have been chosen as the most striking and suggestive would have been "hemlock;" then if the tenth object had been vase, they would have associated the two ideas vase and hemlock in the simplest and most natural manner they could think of, which would have been by conceiving that that particular vase might have contained the hemlock. When the object acting as a prompter had recalled the leading idea "hemlock," the subordinate oncs that pertained to it would then be readily brought back to the mind in proper sequence. Proceeding in this manner they could commit to memory a hundred or more such paragraphs, whether involved or otherwise, preserving a clear and orderly remembrance of each, and could relate any one of them at pleasure.
In using such facilities, it is not at all necessary to have a fresh object for each occasion, as from the strong and exquisitely wonderful property of genc-ralizing ideas inherent in all, the same objects may be used to any number of ideas, and a ready and distinct remembrance of them will invariably be preserved.
​By some few this plan has been, and will be, derided, and termed crude and childish, but so efficacious and helpful was it found in former times, that Cicero and many others of the mammoth intellects of past ages expressed themselves greatly aided by, and indebted to it. Its very power and usefulness consist in its extreme simplicity, while to a certain extent it is so philosophical and natural that it ought hence to have been preserved from cavil.
To recapitulate; their chief plan consisted of having certain familiar objects, following one another in a fixed and regular order, firmly imprinted on the mind, to which they attached the primary or leading ideas of what they wished to remember, by imagining some action or relation between them, in such a manner, that when they again reverted to these objects, such ideas would accompany them in the mind. These objects act the part of prompters, and, as the assistance they afford is so great, we shall proceed in the next chapter to construct a set, on the laws that have been explained.