Beattie, James (1735-1803)

Of Memory and Imagination [from Dissertations Moral and Critical]

London

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

1783

"These are some of the general heads, under which may be arranged the manifold treasures of human Memory."

But of a human Memory, improved to no extraordinary pitch, how vast is the comprehension! With what an endless multitude of thoughts is it supplied, by reflection, reading, and conversation, inlets of ideas denied to the inferiour animals; and by an experience incomparably more diversified than theirs, and withal so modelled by our powers of arrangement and invention (which are also peculiar to man) as to be far more useful in itself, and much more distinctly remembered! Things natural; as animals, vegetables, minerals, fossils, mountains, vallies; land and water; earth and heaven; the sun, moon, and stars, with their several appearances, motions, and periods; the atmosphere and meteors, with all the vicissitudes of weather:--things artificial; as towns, streets, houses, highways, and machines, with their various appendages:--abstract notions in regard to truth and falsehood, beauty and deformity, virtue and vice, proportions in quantity and number, religion, commerce, and policy, whereof the brutes know nothing, and which are the chief materials of human conversation:--these are some of the general heads, under which may be arranged the manifold treasures of human Memory. And under each of these heads, what an infinity of individual things are comprehended!--Let a person, who has been as much in the world, as men of enterprise commonly are, revolve in his mind, how many human creatures he has been, and is, acquainted with; how much he remembers of their features, shape, voice, size, character, and sentiments, of their relations, connections, and history: let him then think of those men and women, whom he never saw, but has heard and read of; and of the characters he may have seen exemplified