Part 3

Augustine points out, too, what has been repeated by Locke and others until it has become a platitude, that we do not remember objects themselves, but the ideas which we have gained from them. And with his usual subtlety he shows that much of what is ordinarily attributed to perception is really the work of memory.

“We see what importance St. Augustine attaches to memory. It is in his view the faculty which preserves the ideas relating @not@ only to the body, but to the soul, not only to eternal truths, but to the Eternal Being himself——. This memory, which is peculiar to man, and which animals do not possess—this memory, which in a mysterious manner contains in it intelligible realities, is, according to the Bishop of Hippo, one of the three great faculties of man, and the origin of the other two. It is from it that intelligence arises, and the will proceeds from the one to the other and unites them. Thus, if it is allowed to compare things human with things divine, we have in us an image of the august Trinity. Memory, in which is the matter of knowledge, and which is as the place of intelligible things, offers some resemblance to the Father; the intellect, which is derived ¬from¬ and formed from it, is not without analogy to the Son; and love or will, which unites the intelligible (or memory) to the intellect has a certain resemblance to the Holy Spirit.” The phenomena of memory were also important with Augustine as weapons against materialism. By memory the soul knows objects of sense when it no longer perceives them, and, moreover, combines the heterogeneous in ways inexplicable by means of a phys¬ch¬ical substance. And again the soul can form abstract conceptions of space and mathematical truths.

The well-known conditions of a good memory, such as acuteness of sensation, order, and repetition, Augustine notices only incidentally. More attention is given to the relation of the will to memory and to the association of ideas.

Whether we remember or not depends upon the will. By an act of will we avert the memory from sense-perceptions, as, for example, when we hear a speaker and do not notice what he says, or read a page and do not know what we have read, or walk with our attention upon something else. In all these cases we perceive, but do not remember our perceptions. So, too, recollection depends upon the will: “As the will applies the @sense to the@ body (or external object), so it applies the memory to the sense, and the eye of the mind of the thinker to the memory.”

This power of the will over memory is, however, limited by the association of ideas. In order to recall anything by a voluntary effort we must remember the general notion of the thing or some associated idea. “For example, if I wish to remember what I supped on yesterday, either I have already remembered that I did sup, or if not yet this, at least, I have remembered something about that time itself, if nothing else; at all events, I have remembered yesterday and that part of yesterday in which people usually sup, and what supping is.” In another place he says that, of a series of ideas the lost part is recovered “by the part whereof we had hold.”

Many since Augustine have marvelled at the miracle of memory. None have expressed their admiration more eloquently. “Great is this force of memory”, he exclaims, “excessive great, O my God; a large and boundless chamber; who ever sounded the bottom thereof? Yet is this a power of mine, and belongs unto my nature; nor do I myself comprehend all that I am. Therefore is the mind too strait to contain itself. And where should that be which it containeth, not of itself? Is it without and not within? How then doth it not comprehend itself. A wonderful admiration surprises me, amazement seizes me upon this. And men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty billows of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, and pass themselves by; nor wonder that when I spake of all these things, I did not see them with my eyes, yet could not have spoken of them, unless I then actually saw the mountains, billows, rivers, stars, which I had seen, and that ocean which I believe to be inwardly in my memory, and that, with the vast spaces between, as if I saw them abroad. Yet did not I by seeing draw them into myself, when with mine eyes I beheld them; nor are they themselves with me, but their images only. And I know by what sense of the body, each was impressed upon me.”

It is an interesting fact that Augustine noticed the possibility of illusions of memory. Certain rare phenomena—the so-called recollections of Pythagoras and others who were said to have remembered objects perceived in a former state of existence—he explains in a very modern fashion, except that he attributes @these@ beliefs to the agency of evil spirits. “For we must not”, he says, “acquiesce in their story who assert that the Samian Pythagoras recollected some things of this kind, which he had experienced when he was previously here in another body; and others @tell@ yet of others, that they experienced something of the same sort in their minds. But it may be conjectured that these were untrue recollections, such as we commonly experience in sleep, when we fancy we remember, as though we had done or seen it, when we never did or saw at all; and that the minds of these persons, even though awake, were affected in this way at the suggestion of malicious and deceitful spirits, whose care it is to confirm, or to sow some false belief concerning the changes of souls, in order to deceive men.” If they truly remembered such things, he argues, such phenomena would not be as rare; but many persons would experience the same.

Perhaps the most serious criticism of Augustine’s psychology of memory is that he entirely neglects the physiological side of the subject. He does not even notice the relation of memory to states of health or disease, and of youth or age. In one place, however, he states that memory has its seat in one of the three ventricles of the brain, which is situated between that which is the seat of sensation and that which presides @over@ ¬of¬ locomotion, so that our movements may be coordinated.

The criticism has also been made that Augustine seems to waver in his conception of memory, that he sometimes represents it as the source of all our intellectual activity comparing it among the other faculties to the Father in the Trinity; that again he seems to limit this faculty to the work of preserving knowledge acquired empirically. Certainly in some passages he seems to make memory contain a kind of innate ideas that may be drawn forth by suggestion.

But if Augustine is unsatisfactory in this, it must be remembered that he is not writing a psychology and that he was, as Ferraz calls him, a philosopher of transition. “He combats Plato’s doctrine of reminiscence, and prepares the way for the innate ideas of Descartes, without positively enough rejecting the former, and without clearly enough admitting the latter.”

The pathological side of memory seems to have been little studied by the ancients. Augustine referred to the possibility of illusions of memory in the way already mentioned. Seneca tells of a certain Sabinus who had so bad a memory that he forgot the name of Ulysses, and again of Achilles, and sometimes of Priam, though he knew them as well as we remember our schoolmasters. Some remarkable cases of amnesia were reported to the Elder Pliny. “Nothing whatever in man,” he says, “is of so frail a nature as the memory; for it is affected by disease, by injuries, and even by fright; being sometimes partially lost and at @other@ times entirely so. A man who received a blow from a stone forgot the names of the letters (of the alphabet) only; while, on the other hand, another person, who fell from a very high roof could not so much as recollect his mother or his relations and neighbors. Another person in consequence of some disease forgot his own servants even; and Messala Corvinus, the orator, lost all recollection of his own name.” While these cases are good illustrations of certain diseases of memory, they are not reported with sufficient accuracy and detail to render them of much scientific value. Ancient thinkers appear not to have seen the importance of studying the pathological conditions of memory.

VI.

No historical sketch of memory among the ancient Greeks and Romans is complete without some mention of their mnemonic systems. The art of mnemonics seems to have been much in vogue among them. There are frequent allusions to this art in the works of Aristotle, Plato, and other classic writers. Aristotle is reported by some to have written a work upon mnemonics. Every scholar of the classics is familiar with the story that ascribes the invention of the art to Simonides.

The main principles of the ancient mnemonic systems according to Cicero and Quintilian were as follows. The thing to be remembered was localized by the imagination in some definite place—say in a room of a real or imaginary house; and, if necessary, a concrete symbol as vivid as possible was associated with it. This method was used by the Romans as an aid in oratory; and it has been said that the phrases, “in the first place,” “in the second place,” and the like, originated in this ancient practice.

The ancient systems of mnemonics are inferior to the best modern systems, that, @since@ the days of Pick have been based upon sound psychological principles. But the ancient systems were probably very helpful @to@ eye-minded people. The men with remarkable memories, mentioned by Cicero and other ancient writers very likely owed much to mnemonic aids. It is of special psychological interest to consider the ancient mnemonic devices in the light of such studies as those of Galton upon mental imagery, number forms, and the like. The high estimate that many of the ancients placed upon the mnemonic art, may, perhaps, fairly be taken as evidence that what Galton calls the faculty of visualisation was developed among them. Especially some of the Roman orators seem to have possessed this faculty in a high degree.

Biographical Note of the Author.

I was born at Dunbarton, N.H. on the 3d of Dec. 1855, and am the youngest son of Samuel and Hannah Dane Burnham. I graduated at the High School at Manchester, N.H. in 1875. The next three years I spent in teaching and in study. In 1878 I entered Harvard College, and graduated in the Class of ’82. The following year was spent in teaching in the Preparatory Department of Wittenberg College. The next two years were spent at the State Normal School at Potsdam, N.Y., where my work was the teaching of Latin and Rhetoric. In 1885 I entered the Johns Hopkins University. In this university I have held the positions of Fellow in Philosophy and Fellow by Courtesy. My work has been chiefly under the direction of Prof. G. Stanley Hall and Dr. Richard T. Ely.

William Henry Burnham.

FOOTNOTES:

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Footnote 1:

For reference see Carus: Geschichte der Psychologie, pp. 150 & 169.

Footnote 2:

Theophrastus, 45.

Footnote 3:

Theophrastus, 4. Cf. Siebeck: Geschichte der Psychologie. Erste Abtheilung, p. 150.

Footnote 4:

Phaedrus, 73.