On Memory. A495 
“Memory,” says Locke, “is the store-house of our 
ideas. The narrow mind of man not being capable of 
having many ideas under view and consideration at once, 
it was necessary to have a repository in which to lay up 
those ideas which it may afterwards have use for; but our 
ideas being nothing but actual perceptions in the mind, 
which cease to be when there is no perception of them, 
this laying up of ideas in the memory signifies that the 
mind has a power in many cases to revive perceptions it, 
has once had, with this additional perception annexed to 
them, that it has had them before; and it is by the assist- 
ance of this faculty that we are said to have all those ideas 
in our understanding, which we can make the objects of 
our thoughts without the help of those sensible qualities 
which first imprinted them there.” 
Attention and repetition help much to fix ideas in the 
memory; but those which make the deepest and most 
lasting impression are those accompanied by pleasure or 
pain. Ideas but once taken in and never repeated are soon 
buried, but not lost. 
It is a well-known axiom that there can be no annihila- 
tion of any particle of matter; and as matter is indestruc- 
tible, are we not bound to presume that psychical impres- 
sions, however they may fade, can never perish. If the lower 
defies annihilation, surely the higher must be beyond and 
above its reach. Man may break up and re-combine by 
scientific agencies, but the Creator of the universe has set 
a limit to man’s power and as “ He can alone create,so He 
can alone destroy.” 
The memory of some men is tenacious to a miracle ; ; but 
yet there seems to bea constant decay of all the ideas, even 
of those which are struck deepest, and in minds the most 
retentive, so that if they are not sometimes renewed the 
print appears to wear out, and at last to vanish altogether. 
Those ideas which are often refreshed by a frequent re- 
turn of the objects or actions that produced them fix them- 
selves best in the memory and remain longest there; such 
are the original qualities of bodies, viz., solidity, extension, 
figure, motion, &c., and those that most often affect us, as 
heat and cold. It is obvious, also, that events would be 
more readily retained than chronological dates or mere 
nomenclature. 
In memory the mind is often more than barely passive, 
for it sets itself to work to search out some hidden ideas, 
Sometimes they start of their own accord, and sometimes 
