CHAPTER XVII. 121 far I have indulged some loose and unconnected thoughts and remarks with regard to the different powers of wit, ,memory, and judgment. For it was very difficult to throw them into a regular formor method without more room. Let us now with more regularity treat of the memory alone. Though the memory be a natural faculty of the mind of man, and belongs to spirits which are not incarnate, yet it is greatly assisted or hindered, and much diversified by the brain or the animal nature to which the soul is united in this present .state. But what part of the brain that is, wherein the images of things lie treasured up, is very hard for us to determine with certainty. It is most probable that those very fibres, pores or traces of the brain, which assist at the first idea or perception of any object, are the same which assist also at the recollection of it : and then it will follow that the memory has no special part of the brain devoted to its own service,. but uses all those parts in general, which subserve our sensations as well as our thinking and reasoning powers. As the memory grows and improves in young persons from their childhood, and decays in old age, so it may be increased by art and labour, and proper exercise ; or it may be injured and quite spoiled by sloth, or by a disease, or a stroke on the head. There are some reasonings on this subject, which make it evi- dent, that the goodness of a memory depends in a great degree upon theconsistence and the temperature of that part of the brain, which is appointed to assist the exercise of all our sensible and intellectual faculties. So for instance, in children ; they perceive and forget an hundred things in an hour ; the brain is to soft, that it receives immediately all impress :ems like water or liquid mud, and retains scarcely any of them : all the traces, forms or images which are drawn there, are immediately effaced or closed. up again, as though you wrote with your linger ou the surface of a river or on a vessel of oil. On the contrary, in old age, men have a very feeble remem- brance of things that were done of late, that is, the same day or week, or year, the brain is grown so hard, that the present images or strokes make little or no impression, and therefore they immediately vanish : Prisco in his seventy- eighth year, will tell long stories of things done when he was in the battle at the Boyne almost fifty years ago, and when he studied at Oxford seven years before ; for these impressions were made when the brain was more susceptive of them ; and they have been deeply engraven at the proper season, and therefore they reniait. But words or things which he lately spoke or did, they are immedi- ately fórgotten, because the brain is now grown more dry and solid in its consistence, and receives not much more impression, than if you wrote with your finger on a fluor of clay, or a plais- tered wall.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTcyMjk=