LITMIR.BIZ

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the passing hour. He lives in a past world. The scenes of his childhood, the sports and companions of his youth, the hills and streams, the bright eyes and laughing faces on which his young eyes rested, in which his young heart delighted—these visit him again in his solitude, as he sits in his chair by the quiet fireside. He lives over again the past. He wanders again by the old hills, and over the old meadows. He feels again the vigor of youth. He leads again his bride to the altar. He brings home toys for his children, and enters again into their sports. And so the extremes of life meet. Age completes the circuit, and brings us back to the starting-point. We close where we began. Life is a magic ring.

      The recollection of past Sorrow not always painful.—But life is not all joyous. Mingled with the brighter hues of every life are also much sadness and sorrow, and these, too, are to be remembered. It might be supposed that, while memory, by recalling the pleasing incidents of the past, might contribute much to our happiness, she would add, in perhaps an equal degree, to our sorrow, by recalling much that is painful to the thoughts. Such, however, I am convinced, is not the fact. The benevolence of the Creator has ordered it otherwise. To no one, perhaps, is memory the source of greater pleasure, strange as it may seem, than to the mourner. The very circumstances that tend to renew our grief, and keep alive our sorrow, in case of some severe calamity or bereavement, are still cherished with a melancholy satisfaction of which we would not be deprived. There is a luxury in our very grief, and in the remembrance of that for which we grieve. We would not forget what we have lost. Every recollection and association connected with it are sacred. Time assuages our grief, but impairs not the strength and sacredness of those associations, nor diminishes the pleasure with which we recall the forms we shall see no more, and the scenes that are gone forever. Every memento of the departed one is sacred; the books, the flowers, the favorite walks, the tree in whose shadow he was wont to recline, all have a significance and a value which the stricken heart only can interpret, and which memory only can afford.

      We recollect the Past as it was.—It is to be noticed, also, that, in such cases, the picture which memory furnishes is a transcript of the past as it was; the image is stereotyped and unchangeable. Other things change, we change; that changes not. It has a fixed value. A mother, for instance, loses a child of three years. It ever remains to her a child of three years. She remembers it as it was. She grows old; twenty summers and winters pass; yet as often as she visits the little mound, now scarce to be distinguished from the level surface, there comes to her recollection that little child as he was, when she hung, for the last time, over that pale, sweet face that she should see no more. She still thinks of him, dreams of him, as a child, for it is as such only that she remembers him.

      Blessed boon, that gives us just the past; when all things change, fortunes vary, friends depart, the world grows unkind, and we grow old, the former things remain treasured in our memory, and we can stand as mourners at the grave of what we once were.

      VIII. Historical Sketch.—Different Theories Of Memory.

      Ancient Theory.—The idea formerly, and almost universally entertained respecting the modus operandi of the faculty we call memory, was, that in perception and the various operations of the senses, certain impressions are made on the sensorium—certain forms and types of things without, certain images of them—which remain when the external object is no longer present, and become imprinted thus on the mind. Such, certainly, was the doctrine of the earliest Greek commentators on Aristotle. Such, I must think, is substantially the doctrine of Aristotle himself.

      Theory of Aristotle.—His idea is, that memory, as well as imagination, primarily and directly, relates only to sensible objects, and gives us only images of these objects, and even when it gives us strictly intellectual objects, gives us these only by images. One cannot think, he says, without images. Its source and origin, then, he concludes, is the sensibility, and so it pertains to animals, as well as men; only to those, however, which have the perception of time, since memory is a modification of sensation or intellectual conception, under the condition of time past. Such being, in his view, the nature and source of memory, he goes on to ask how it is that only a modification (or state) of the mind being present, and the object itself absent, one recalls that absent object?

      "Manifestly," he replies, "we must believe that the impression which is produced, in consequence of the sensation, in the soul, and in that part of the body which perceives the sensation, is analogous to a species of painting, and that the perception of that impression constitutes precisely what we call memory. The movement which then takes place in the mind imprints there a sort of type of the sensation analogous to the seal which one imprints on wax with a ring. Hence it is that those who by the violence of the impression, or by the ardor of age are in a great excitement (movement) have not the memory of things, as if the movement and seal had been applied to running water. In the case of others, however, who are in a sort cold, as the plaster of old edifices, the very hardness of the part which receives the impression prevents the image from leaving the least trace. Hence it is that young children and old men have so little memory. It is the same with those who are too lively, and those who are too slow. Neither remember well. The one class are too humid, the other too hard. The image dwells not in the soul of the one, makes no impression whatever on that of the other.

      "How is it now," he goes on to ask, "that this stamp, impression, image, or painting, in us, a mere mode of the mind, can recall the absent object?" His answer is, that the impression or image is a copy of that object, while, at the same time, it is, in itself considered, only a modification of our mind, just as a painting is a mere picture, and yet a copy from nature. (Parva Naturalia: Memory, ch. 1.)

      Defence of Aristotle.—Sir W. Hamilton defends Aristotle against the strictures of Dr. Reid, upon this subject, by the supposition that he used these expressions not in a literal, but in a figurative or analogical sense. The figure, however, if it be one, is very clearly and boldly sustained, and constitutes, in fact, the whole explanation given of the process of memory—the entire theory. Take away these expressions, and you take away the whole substance of his argument, the whole solution of the problem. Sensation, or intellectual conception, produces an impression on the soul, and imprints there a type of itself, not unlike a painting or the stamp of a seal on wax, and the perception of this is memory. Such is in brief his theory.

      Theory of Hobbes.—Not far remote from this was the theory of Hobbes, who regarded memory as a decaying or vanishing sense; that of Hume, who represents it as merely a somewhat weaker impression than that which we designate as perception; and that of the celebrated Malebranche, who accounted for memory by making it to depend entirely on the changes which take place in the fibres of the brain. "For even as the branches of a tree which have continued some time bent in a certain form, still preserve an aptitude to be bent anew after the same manner, so the fibres of the brain having once received certain impressions by the course of the animal spirits, and by the action of objects, retain a long time some facility to receive these same dispositions. Now the memory consists only in this faculty, since we think on the same things when the brain receives the same impressions."

      He goes on to explain how, as the brain undergoes a change in different periods of life, the mind is affected accordingly. "The fibres of the brain in children are soft, flexible, and delicate; a riper age dries, hardens, and strengthens them; but in old age they become wholly inflexible." ... "For as we see the fibres which compose the flesh harden by time, and that the flesh of a young partridge is, without dispute, more tender than that of an old one, so the fibres of the brain of a child or youth will be much more soft and delicate than those of persons more advanced in years."

      Strictures upon this Theory.—Without disputing what is here stated as to the difference in the fibres of the brain at different periods of life, it remains to be proved that all this has any thing to do with the differences of memory in different persons, or with the phenomena of memory in general.

      These theories, it will be observed, all assume that in perception and sensation some physical effect is produced on the system, which remains after the original sensation or perception has ceased to act, and that memory is the result of that remaining effect, the perception, or conscious cognizance of it by the mind. The process is a purely physiological one.

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