« back to search

"If thoughts could occupy space, we might be tempted to think, that we had laid them up in certain cells or repositories, to remain there till we had occasion for them."

— Beattie, James (1735-1803)

Author

Beattie, James (1735-1803)

Work Title

Of Memory and Imagination [from Dissertations Moral and Critical]

Place of Publication

London

Publisher

Printed for W. Strahan; and T. Cadell ... and W. Creech

Date

1783

Metaphor

"If thoughts could occupy space, we might be tempted to think, that we had laid them up in certain cells or repositories, to remain there till we had occasion for them."

Metaphor in Context

This is a faculty, which, if it were less common, and we equally qualified to judge of it, would strike us with astonishment. That we should have it in our power to recal past sensations and thoughts, and make them again present, as it were: that a circumstance of our former life should, in respect of us, be no more; and yet occur to us, from time to time, dressed in colours so lively, as to enable us to examine it, and judge of it, as if it were still an object of sense:-- these are facts, whereof we every day have experience, and which, therefore, we overlook as things of course. But, surely, nothing is more wonderful, or more inexplicable. If thoughts could occupy space, we might be tempted to think, that we had laid them up in certain cells or repositories, to remain there till we had occasion for them. But thoughts cannot occupy space; nor be conceived to have any other existence, that what the mind gives them by meditating upon them. Yet, that which has been long forgotten, nay, that which we have often endeavoured in vain to recollect, will sometimes, without any effort of ours, occur to us, on a sudden, and, if I may so speak, of its own accord. A tune, for example, which I hear to-day, and am pleased with, I perhaps endeavour to [end page 8] remember to-morrow, and next day, and the day following, without success: and yet, that very tune shall occur to me, a month after, when my mind is taken up with something else. Where, if I may ask the question, were my ideas of this tune, when I wished to recollect them, and could not? How comes it, that they now present themselves, when I am thinking of them at all? These questions no man can answer: but the fact is certain.
(II.i, pp. 8-9)