MEMORY. 671 



obliterated, and never reappear through life ; for instance, I drove 

 through Paris a day or two ago, and though I saw plainly some sixty 

 or eighty new faces, I cannot now recall any one of them ; some extra- 

 ordinary circumstance, a fit of delirium, or the excitement of haschish 

 would be necessary to give them a chance of revival. On the other 

 hand, there are sensations with a force of revival which nothing de- 

 stroys or decrease;}. Though, as a rule, time weakens and impairs our 

 strongest sensations, these reappear entire and intense, without having 

 lost a particle of their detail, or any degree of their force. M. Brierre 

 de Boismont, having suffered when a child from a disease of the scalp, 

 asserts that ' after fifty-five years have elapsed he can still feel his hair 

 pulled out under the treatment of the skull-cap.'' — For my own part, 

 after thirty years, I remember feature for feature the appearance of the 

 theatre to which I was taken for the first time. From the third row of 

 boxes, the body of the theatre appeared to me an immense well, red 

 and flaming, swarming with heads ; below, on the right, on a narrow 

 floor, two men and a woman entered, went out, and re-entered, made 

 gestures, and seemed to me like lively dwarfs : to my great surprise, 

 one of these dwarfs fell on his knees, kissed the lady's hand, then hid 

 behind a screen ; the other, who was coming in, seemed angry, and 

 raised his arm. I was then seven, I could understand nothing of what 

 was going on ; but the well of crimson velvet was so crowded, gilded, 

 and bright, that after a quarter of an hour I was, as it were, intoxicated, 

 and fell asleep. 



" Every one of us may find similar recollections in his memory, and 

 may distinguish in them a common character. The primitive impres- 

 sion has been accompanied hy an extraordinarg degree of attention, 

 either as being horrible or delightful, or as being new, surprising, and 

 out of proportion to the ordinary run of our life ; this it is we express 

 by saying that we have been strongly impressed ; that we were ab- 

 sorbed, that we coidd not think of anything else ; that our other sen- 

 sations' were efi'aced ; that we were pursued all the next day by the re- 

 sulting image ; that it beset us, that we could not drive it away ; that 

 all distractions were feeble beside it. It is by force of this dispro- 

 portion that impressions of childhood are so persistent ; the mind being 

 quite fresh, ordinary objects and events are surprising. At present, 

 after seeing so many large halls and full theatres, it is impossible for 

 me, when I enter one. to feel swallowed up, engulfed, and, as it were, 

 lost in a huge dazzling well. The medical man of sixty, who has expe- 

 rienced much suffering, both personally and in imagination, would be 

 less upset now by a surgical operation than when he was a child. 



"Whatever may be the kind of attention, voluntary or involuntary, 

 it always acts alike ; the image of an object or event is capable of re- 

 vival, and of complete revival, in proportion to the degree of atten- 

 tion with which we have considered the object or event. We put this 

 rule in practice ai every moment in ordinary life. If we are apply- 

 ing ourselves to a book or are in lively conversation, while an air 



