Part 43

IDA. I have read two stories of melancholy romance, which are not mal-à-propos to your arguments, Evelyn, in which the memory of one intense impression has “gone into a being,” influencing the current of every after-thought, and the mind seeming ever after unconscious of all past or present, but the incident of one moment.

A gentleman, on the point of marriage, left his intended bride for a short time. He usually travelled in the stage-coach to the place of her abode; but the last journey he took from her was the last of his life. Anxiously expecting his return, she went to meet the vehicle, when an old friend announced to her the death of her lover. She uttered an involuntary scream, and one piteous exclamation, “He is dead!” From this fatal moment, for fifty years, has this unfortunate female daily, in all seasons, traversed the distance of a few miles to the spot where she expected her future husband to alight from the coach, uttering, in a plaintive tone, “He is not come yet; I will return to-morrow.”

A young clergyman, on the eve of marriage, received a severe injury. During his future life of celibacy, which was protracted to the 80th year, this one idea only possessed his mind, that his hour of happiness was approaching, and to the last moment he talked of his marriage with all the passion of a devoted lover.

EV. Thanks to your own memory, Ida, for these incidents. That the possession of the faculty of this impression of memory can be demonstrated, we might doubt, were verbal description only employed; but when we see the artist trace the features of a person long lost to us from memory, we know that such ideas existed, and were then re-excited in his mind.

The power of the intellect in retaining these impressions is wonderful. Cyrus is said to have remembered the names of all his soldiers, and Themistocles those of two thousand Athenians.

We have records from Seneca and others, that some will remember, after one perusal or hearing, very long poems; and even have repeated, word for word, the unconnected jumble of a newspaper. Pascal, as we are told by Locke, never forgot anything. Almost equally retentive was the memory of my excellent teacher, Sir Astley Cooper, and hence his nearly unexampled accumulation of facts. The memory of Ben Jonson was retentive to perfection, until the fortieth year of his age. In his youth, he could repeat an entire volume after its perusal; nay, even the whole of his own works, or as he quaintly writes, “All that ever I made.” We know that Bloomfield composed his “Farmer’s Boy” in the bustle of a shoe manufactory, and wrote from his memory.

ASTR. I have heard that the particles of the body are constantly changing: if so, how can memory exist in the brain?

EV. The answer is easy. Because particles of exact similarity are deposited as others are removed. The parts thus regenerated, of whatever structure they may be, still being identical and unchanged in function.

If the dream be an inspiration, Astrophel, it is like “a spirit of the past,” and does not “speak like sybils of the future.”

But ere I offer some analogies of waking memory, in illustration of the causes of the dream, I must again fatigue you by a glance at the physiology of memory; the origin or mode of impression of a sense, and the mode of recurrence of such impression, i.e. the excitement of the dream.

Aristotle has asserted that senses cannot receive material objects, but only their species, or ειδωλον; and Mr. Locke entertained the same idea. For this effect, however, matter must have touched a sense, and its impression, as Baron Haller thought, must have been mechanical. For instance, the rays emanating from a body, and impinging on the retina, or an undulation of sound on the labyrinth of the ear, stamp an image on the brain, by which, (in accordance with a prior observation on illusion,) some minute change is inevitably effected; some minute cerebral atoms are displaced.

If you propose to me that curious physiological question,—in what consists the function of a nerve—in oscillation, or in undulation of a fluid, in electricity, or in magnetism? or how the nerve carries this impression to the brain? or if you desire me to meet the subtle objection, which Dr. Reid advanced against the opinion of Aristotle and of the more modern psychologists,—I might weary you with conjectures like those of Newton and Hartley, that some ethereal fluid was, by the impulse of peculiar stimulus to its nerve, the cause of the senses; or that the mental phenomena are an imparting, or influence of the immaterial soul by corporeal vibration; or that dreams are “motions of fibres:” and at length, with humility confess this to be a mystery we cannot yet fathom. And this I do the more willingly, as it may prove my devotion to the proper limits of our study; moreover, the question itself is not essential to my argument.

Yet it is certain that external impressions of every object or subject, reach the brain through the medium of a nerve; and when the same fibrils of those nerves, or that spot of brain on which the original image rested, are again irritated by their proper stimulus, or by the same or a similar body, an association is produced, and memory is the result.

For the insurance of this sense of touch, and feeling, and perception, it is essential that the impression at the end of a nerve shall be perfectly transmitted along its course to the brain, so that the brain shall be conscious, or sensible of this impression. For if a nerve be cut asunder, or a ligature be placed on any portion of it between the skin and the brain, the sensation instantly ceases. It is not essential, however, that the contact should take place at the moment of the perception; and the explanation of this involves one of the most curious phenomena of the body’s feeling; and, indeed, the metaphysical mystery of the nature of memory, which is too abstruse a point to be touched by us here. After amputation, the patient may still complain of pain, and heat, and cold, in the dissevered limb; he experiences the memory of a sensation; he feels, as it were, the ghost of his arm or leg. On the night succeeding the operation, the groaning patient has often cried out to me, with pain in the toe or finger of that limb; and when he is moved or shifts his position, he will attempt to hold his leg, or will beg his nurse to take care that she does not touch or run against it. Nay, I have frequently, on asking a patient how he felt, even after the lapse of many months from the operation, been answered, that he was well, but had not lost the pain in his leg; or that his leg or his arm were lying by his side, when perhaps the limb was undergoing the process of maceration in the dissecting-room, or the bones were bleached and dangling in the museum.

The pain, or common feeling of the limb, has stamped an image or eidōlon on the brain, which is not easily effaced; there remains an internal sensibility on this point of memory. If the subject be subsequently presented to the mind by a touch at the end of the stump, or even by a thought, the idea of the limb that had lain dormant, will be re-excited by that wondrous sympathy of brain and nerve, and the result will be a consciousness of having once possessed, or of having experienced a pain in this leg.

And, on this principle of the force of memory, we may explain many of our excited feelings: those which remain after we have been wafted in a boat, or rolled along in a carriage, or whirled aloft in a swing; the nervous impression in the brain is re-excited ere it was exhausted.

Now, an image may be stamped on the brain, in a tumult, without our cognizance or perception, and then revived in slumber;—we wake in wonder at having seen what we never saw or thought of before. Such is the dream of Lovel, in the “Antiquary;” and such the rationale of that tale of mystery, respecting the £6. in the Glasgow bank, which a dream seems certainly to have developed.

And it is evident that these impressions may recur the easier in slumber, because there is no fresh impression on the senses to produce confusion. But then all these images may be presented at one time; so that we may have either a chaos, or a correct concatenation,—an incident, which Hobbes and other early metaphysicians confess to be inexplicable to them.

In the words of Spurzheim, “Memory is the reproduction of a perception;” and Gall believed that “Remembrance is the faculty of recollecting that we have perceived impressions; and memory, the recollection of the impressions themselves.”

I read, that Esquirol has drawn a distinction between hallucination and illusion,—the first is from within, the second from without. The argument I have adduced of memory and impression,—the one at the beginning, the other at the end, of nerves,—will, I think, illustrate this perfectly. Hallucination, being internal, is of the past; illusion, external,—of the present.

Another metaphysician, Bayle, it is clear, was not ignorant of the basis of phrenology, or of this difference, when he alludes to “certain places on the brain, on which the image of an object, which has no real existence out of ourselves, might be excited.”

INTENSE IMPRESSION.—MEMORY.

“The dream’s here still: even when I wake, it is Without me as within me; not imagined, felt.” CYMBELINE.

EV. I believe, then, that waking and slumbering association is memory; and I have interposed the glimpse of metaphysics to break the monotony of my illustrations, for they are not yet exhausted.

A gentleman, as we read in Dr. Pritchard’s work, was confined, after a severe accident, for several weeks, and the accident was not once during this period remembered by him; but, on his convalescence, he rode again over the same ground, and all the circumstances instantly flashed across his mind.

In their youth, Dr. Rush escorted a lady, on a holiday, to see an eagle’s nest. Many years afterwards, he was called to attend her in the acute stage of typhus; and, on his entrance into her chamber, she instantly screamed out, “Eagle’s nest!” and it is said, from this moment, the fever began to decline.

We ourselves have witnessed these flashes of memory more than once, during the acuteness of brain fever, where journeys, and stories, and studies, have been renewed after they had been long forgotten.

There are many romantic incidents in illustration which have been beautifully wrought into a poem, or drama, as that play of Kotzebue, written to illustrate the happy success of the Abbé de l’Epée in France, in imparting knowledge and receiving sentiments from the deaf and dumb. In this, the young Count Solar, by gestures, unfolds, step by step, his birth-place, and at length screams with joy, as he stands before the palace of his ancestors.