ideas.  Three sets of ideas and three vocabularies are thus available for use on any subject.  In adopting this device of composing through several mediums, you should combine with it the principle of distributing time already discussed in connection with repetition of impressions.  Write a theme one day, then lay it aside for a few days and go back to it with a fresh mind.  The rests will be found very beneficial in helping you to get a new viewpoint of the subject.

Reverting to our discussion of memory, we come upon another question:  In memorizing material like the poem of our example, should one impress the entire poem at once, or break it up into parts, impressing a stanza each day?  Most people would respond, without thought, the latter, and, as a matter of fact, most memorizing takes place in this way.  Experimental psychology, however, has discovered that this is uneconomical.  The selection, if of moderate length, should be impressed as a whole.  If too long for this, it should be broken up as little as possible.  In order to see the necessity for this let us examine your experiences with the memorization of poems in your early school days.  You probably proceeded as follows:  After school one day, you learned the first stanza, then went out to play.  The next day you learned the second one, and so on.  You thought at the end of a week that you had memorized it because, at the end of each day’s sitting, you were able to recite perfectly the stanza learned that day.  On “speaking day” you started out bravely and recited the first stanza without mishap.  When you started to think of the second one, however, it would not come.  The memory balked.  Now what was the matter?  How can we explain this distressing blank?  In psychological terms, we ascribe the difficulty to the failure to make proper associations between stanzas.  Association was made effectively between the lines of the single stanzas, but not between the separate stanzas.  After you finished impressing the first stanza, you went about something else; playing ball, perhaps.  When you approached the poem the next day you started in with the second stanza.  There was then no bridge between the two.  There was nothing to link the last line of the first stanza,

“And things are not what they seem,”

with the first line of the next stanza,

“Life is real, life is earnest.”

This makes clear the necessity of impressing the poem as a whole instead of by parts.

According to another classification, there are two ways of memorizing—­by rote and by logical associations.  Rote memorizing involves the repetition of material just as it stands, and usually requires such long and laborious drill that it is seldom economical.  True, some matter must be memorized this way; such as the days of the week and the names of the months; but there is another and gentler method which is usually more effective and economical than that of brutal