St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Letters or Essays Addressed to Alexander Pope, Esq.

London

1754

"On the other hand, we are able, at our will and with design, to put a sort of force on memory, to seize, as it were, the end of some particular line, and to draw back into the mind, a whole set of ideas that seem to be strung to it, or linked one with the other."

By this faculty then, whatever it be, our simple ideas, which have been spoken of already, are preserved with greater, and our complex ideas, which remain to be spoken of, with less facility. Both one and the other require to be frequently raised in the mind, and frequently recalled to it. I say, with the rest of the world, to be raised, and to be recalled; but surely these words come very short of expressing the wonderful phænomena of memory, the images that are lodged in it present themselves often to the mind without any fresh sensation, and so spontaneously, that the mind seems as passive in these secondary perceptions, as it was in receiving the first impressions. Our simple ideas, and even our complex ideas, and notions return sometimes of themselves, we know not why, nor how, mechanically, as it were, uncalled by the mind, and often to the disturbance of it in the pursuit of other ideas, to which these intruders are foreign. On the other hand, we are able, at our will and with design, to put a sort of force on memory, to seize, as it were, the end of some particular line, and to draw back into the mind, a whole set of ideas that seem to be strung to it, or linked one with the other. In general; when images, essences, ideas, notions, that existed in my mind, are gone out of it, and have no longer any existence there, the mind is often able to will them into existence again, by an act of which we are conscious, but of which we know nothing more, than that the mind performs it. These phænomena are more surprizing, and less to be accounted for than the action of external objects on the organs of sense in the first production of ideas, which is an observation that deserves the notice of those philosophers who deny such action because they cannot comprehend it.
(Essay I, §2; vol. iii, pp. 367-8).

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Reading

At least 5 entries in ESTC (1754, 1777, 1793).

See "Letters or Essays Addressed to Alexander Pope, Esq." in the third volume of David Mallet's The Works of the Late Right Honorable Henry St. John, Lord Viscount Bolingbroke, 5 vols. (London : [s.n.], Printed in the Year 1754). <Link to ESTC><Link to ESTC>

Text from the third volume of The Works of the Late Right Honorable Henry St. John, Lord Viscount Bolingbroke, 5 vols. (Dublin: Printed by P. Byrne: 1793). <Link to Google Books>

Reading also in the 1967 reprint of The Works of Lord Bolingbroke, 4 vols. (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1844).

03/14/2014