148 THE HUMAN BODY. 



nize the ties of blood, of friendship, or of gratitude; the 

 past would have no existence for him, his life would only 

 embrace the present moment, and would flow on like the 

 period immediately succeeding birth. Deprived of experi- 

 ence, impelled by blind instinct, isolated in creation, he 

 could not exist with organs which render necessary every- 

 thing of which he would be deprived. We cannot therefore 

 imagine the human race without memory, and in order to 

 find an organization without this faculty we must descend to 

 the lowest grades of animal life. 



Memory is of a compound nature : partaking of body and 

 of spirit, it is a reflection, an image of ourselves, since it 

 carries us back to every moment that has impressed our 

 lives. An exact and enthusiastic historian of the facts which 

 she recounts to us, she seems to add to our existence the 

 hours already passed, but as she approaches epochs she 

 rudely makes us sensible of the flight of time. It may be 

 happiness that makes us recall hours of pleasure, or in mis- 

 fortune we may remember them with that pain of which the 

 poet sings. She shows us the faces of all who have had a 

 part in our existence, sometimes an isolated portrait, and at 

 others a crowded gallery; a minute object, a plant, a rock, or 

 the grandest scenes in nature; a word, or the entire work of 

 a writer; a fact, or the history of a people. She carries us 

 back in an instant to the most vivid impressions, or to the 

 most abstract conceptions, whether of the senses or the in- 

 tellect. In taking the form of sensation or of thought, she 

 makes us traverse time and space with a swiftness of which 

 nothing material can give us an idea; we might indeed say, 

 that time and space have no existence for the memory, if she 

 did not in surmounting them awaken the idea of the one 

 and the other. Obeying the behests of the will, memory 

 retraces a scientific doctrine as a whole and in detail, the 

 nicest distinctions of the most violent dispute, the series 

 of systems of philosophy, all, in a word, that science or 

 the most profound erudition has been able to classify in the 

 mind. 



We find everywhere the records of extraordinary memories, 

 great numbers of which come down to us from antiquity. 



