an hour, an hour, a day, a week, a month, had elapsed.  The number of rereadings required he took to be a measure of the amount of forgetting that had occurred in the elapsed interval.  And he found some remarkable facts.  The process of forgetting, namely, is vastly more rapid at first than later on.  Thus full half of the piece seems to be forgotten within the first half-hour, two-thirds of it are forgotten at the end of eight hours, but only four-fifths at the end of a month.  He made no trials beyond one month of interval; but, if we ourselves prolong ideally the curve of remembrance, whose beginning his experiments thus obtain, it is natural to suppose that, no matter how long a time might elapse, the curve would never descend quite so low as to touch the zero-line.  In other words, no matter how long ago we may have learned a poem, and no matter how complete our inability to reproduce it now may be, yet the first learning will still show its lingering effects in the abridgment of the time required for learning it again.  In short, Professor Ebbinghaus’s experiments show that things which we are quite unable definitely to recall have nevertheless impressed themselves, in some way, upon the structure of the mind.  We are different for having once learned them.  The resistances in our systems of brain-paths are altered.  Our apprehensions are quickened.  Our conclusions from certain premises are probably not just what they would be if those modifications were not there.  The latter influence the whole margin of our consciousness, even though their products, not being distinctly reproducible, do not directly figure at the focus of the field.

The teacher should draw a lesson from these facts.  We are all too apt to measure the gains of our pupils by their proficiency in directly reproducing in a recitation or an examination such matters as they may have learned, and inarticulate power in them is something of which we always underestimate the value.  The boy who tells us, “I know the answer, but I can’t say what it is,” we treat as practically identical with him who knows absolutely nothing about the answer at all.  But this is a great mistake.  It is but a small part of our experience in life that we are ever able articulately to recall.  And yet the whole of it has had its influence in shaping our character and defining our tendencies to judge and act.  Although the ready memory is a great blessing to its possessor, the vaguer memory of a subject, of having once had to do with it, of its neighborhood, and of where we may go to recover it again, constitutes in most men and women the chief fruit of their education.  This is true even in professional education.  The doctor, the lawyer, are seldom able to decide upon a case off-hand.  They differ from other men only through the fact that they know how to get at the materials for decision in five minutes or half an hour:  whereas the layman is unable to get at the materials at all, not knowing in what books and indexes to look or not understanding the technical terms.