Chapter 66
Memory and recollection; imagination, fancy, dreams and invention.
661 passages · 248 principal · Covers the 49 volumes of primary texts
Memory and imagination are the powers by which the mind holds what is no longer present to the senses. Memory keeps the past. Imagination represents the absent and the never-was, combines old images into new shapes, and in dreams carries on without our consent. The Harvard Classics return to these powers again and again. They are a problem for philosophers who ask how thought arises from sense. They are a theme for poets who mourn and celebrate. And they are a source of trouble for moralists, who find in fancy the root of delusion, superstition and the rule of opinion. Few ideas join the analyst of the mind so closely to the elegist and the novelist.
The most austere modern account derives both powers from sensation. For Hobbes imagination is “nothing but decaying sense.” It weakens with time as later impressions obscure it, and memory is the same thing named for its pastness1,2. Dreams are simply the imaginations of sleepers3. Hume agrees that memory and imagination copy perceptions but never reach their force and vivacity, except in madness4. Berkeley, having put everything in the mind, must still tell real things from chimeras. He does so by the same marks: ideas of fancy are faint, depend on our will, and are irregular in dreams, while ideas of sense are vivid and steady5,6. Descartes treats memory and fantasy as functions of the brain that keep and recombine ideas7. Long before any of them, Plutarch noted that impressions on the imagination can carry judgment away until they are taken for sensation, as happens in dreams8.
The same writers set limits to fancy’s apparent freedom. Hume grants that thought seems unbounded, joining incongruous shapes and travelling beyond the universe9. Yet its creative power only compounds what sense supplied, as in a golden mountain10. Above all, it cannot of itself command belief, which is a different manner of conceiving11,12. Burke likewise denies that imagination produces anything absolutely new, though he makes it the province of hopes, fears and passions13. Milton’s Adam gives a poetic version of the theory. Fancy forms images from the senses and misjoins them in dreams when Reason rests14.
Images also follow one another by rule. Hobbes describes trains of thought that repeat sequences once experienced in sense. Even wandering thought keeps a hidden coherence, as in his Roman penny example, and remembrance is a “hunting” back through times and places15,16. Hume grounds the felt connexion of cause and effect in a customary transition of the imagination17. He observes that a friend’s picture enlivens our idea of him by resemblance18. Homer had already dramatized such association: Odysseus’s scar calls up Eurycleia’s recognition and a whole story of the past19.
Augustine’s analysis stands apart in depth. For him memory is not a fading residue but vast palaces, where images enter each by its own gate and are summoned at will20,21. Memory holds more than images. It contains the liberal sciences as the things themselves, which no sense delivered22. It contains past affections retained without being felt, as a belly stores food23. It even holds forgetfulness, which is a paradox, since forgetting effaces what is remembered24,25. Augustine finally identifies memory with the mind itself26. That identification sends his inquiry inward. We seek the happy life only because some notice of it lies in memory27,28. So he searches memory’s chambers for God, first finding nothing of Him beyond what memory has kept, and then finding God neither there nor himself29,30,31.
Augustine’s claim that memory holds what sense never gave echoes Plato’s doctrine that learning is recollection. In the Phaedo, a lover seeing the beloved’s lyre recalls the beloved. This shows how likeness and unlikeness both prompt remembering, and how sense perception recalls forgotten ideas32,33. Cicero takes children’s swift learning as evidence of prior knowledge34. Bacon sets Plato’s remembrance beside Solomon’s saying that all novelty is oblivion35. Poets supply the mythic counterpart, forgetfulness of a former life. Virgil’s souls drink Lethe before rebirth36. Dante, in a moral transformation of the myth, must taste Lethe to lose remembrance of offence and Eunoe to recover every good deed37. The Norse potions are darker: Grimhild’s drinks make Sigurd forget Brynhild and Gudrun forget her wrongs38,39. Lessing thinks it fortunate that we forget previous lives, since recollecting them would mean misusing the present40.
Whether memory can be trained is disputed. Cicero holds that memory does not fail old men who exercise it. He reviews each evening what he said and did, after the Pythagoreans41,42. Pliny ascribes Isaeus’s prodigious memory to practice43. Dana’s Tom Harris forgets nothing he reads44,45. Locke denies the premise. Strength of memory depends on constitution, and learning pages by heart does not strengthen it for other things. Attention, method and order help, and only choice passages deserve lodging46,47,48. Montaigne would judge learning by the witness of life rather than of memory49, and Mill warns against mere exercises of memory50. Pascal adds a religious caution: scripture retained by memory alone is an inanimate body without the spirit51.
Writers who confess weak memories turn to aids. Montaigne notes date and judgment at the end of each book he reads52. Pascal’s thought escapes even as he writes53. Swift prescribes the commonplace book54. Sidney argues that verse fixes memory, each word recalling the next55, and Aeschylus calls letters memory’s handmaid56. Cervantes makes comedy of the failure: Sancho garbles Dulcinea’s letter while the others praise his memory57.
Remembrance can wound. Dante’s Francesca finds no greater grief than recalling happy days in misery58. Cardenio curses the memory that torments him59. Raleigh calls memory the only keeper of past pleasures, and it yields only sighs60. For Tennyson the remembering of happier things is sorrow’s crown61. Swinburne sets the mother who cannot forget against the swallow who has forgotten62. Rossetti prefers that the beloved forget and smile63. Byron’s Manfred longs for oblivion64. Pascal states the matter evenly: memory can both hurt and help65.
Others find consolation. For Cicero, recollection keeps a dead friendship alive66. The psalmist remembers ancient wonders67, and the exiles swear never to forget Zion68. Wordsworth goes furthest. The remembered Wye restores him in city rooms, memory becomes a dwelling-place of lovely forms, and the “shadowy recollections” of childhood are the fountain-light of all our day69,70,71. Cowper’s portrait of his mother lets fancy weave the dream that she lives72.
Nostalgic return has its fullest prose record in Dana’s revisit after twenty-four years. A pile of hides calls up his boyhood labour as in a dream, and he reminisces for hours with an old captain73,74. Stevenson finds in Pepys a deliberate cultivator of reminiscence, who wrote notes to his future self75.
Memory also bears on identity and fame. Odysseus proves who he is by childhood memories of the garden76. Rousseau’s vicar holds that personal identity is preserved only by memory77. Augustine knows his infancy only by report78. Hamlet gives a great man’s memory half a year79, and Marcus Aurelius sees all memory soon overwhelmed80. Emerson, by contrast, urges us not to drag the corpse of memory81.
Imagination’s power over judgment draws the sharpest attack. Pascal calls it the mistress of error. It stamps the same character on true and false and rules reason, which adopts its principles as her own82,83. It unhinges the philosopher on a plank over a precipice and the magistrate at a preacher’s bad shave84,85. It dispenses beauty, justice and reputation, and robes and ceremony work through it86,87. Once power has made its facts, imagination sustains respect for rank88.
Cervantes gives the same thesis a body. Don Quixote’s fantasy, filled from books, takes enchantments for certain history89. It makes an inn a castle, sheep armies, a basin a helmet and a sweating peasant girl perfumed90,91,92,93. When facts resist, a malicious enchanter explains them94.
Fearful images show the same tyranny. Locke warns that frightening images impressed early haunt a person for life, despite reason95. Macbeth’s dagger is a false creation of a heat-oppressed brain96. Augustine finds that habitual images persuade in dreams what waking reason resists. Manzoni’s half-remembered wonder stories turn bushes into terrors97.
Against this indictment, the moderns mount a defence that begins by dividing the faculty. Hobbes already praises good fancy as the swift observation of rare similitudes, while warning that unguided fancy becomes a kind of madness98. Wordsworth rejects the view that imagination and fancy are modes of memory, a reduction Hugo also resists against La Harpe99,100. Wordsworth calls imagination creative. It consolidates many into one, as in Milton’s fleet hanging in the clouds. Fancy he calls aggregative, yielding mere surprise101,102,103. Schiller traces imagination’s leap from free association to free form104. Bagehot finds even Milton’s originality grounded in molded memory105.
The defence then becomes moral. Shelley makes imagination the great instrument of moral good, since we put ourselves in another’s place, and poetry strengthens that power as exercise strengthens a limb106. Hunt insists that imaginary pains and pleasures are real in their effects, and that imagination makes the walker in a park richer than its owner107,108. Mill likewise concludes that imaginative emotion is a fact, not an illusion109. Emerson calls imagination a high sort of seeing110. Coleridge mourns the loss of his “shaping spirit of Imagination”111. Hunt’s claim that whatever moves us is real stands directly against Pascal’s.
The theatre tests the question. Johnson argues that imitations please by bringing realities to mind, without our mistaking a painted landscape for a real one112. Lamb holds that staging replaces free conceptions with flesh and blood, so that reading alone sustains belief in Macbeth’s witches113,114. Burke, examining his own mind, finds that words seldom raise pictures at all115. Daydreams cut both ways. The Arabian Nights’ glass-seller dreams of greatness until he kicks over his tray116,117. Wordsworth, on the other hand, keeps the unvisited Yarrow as a treasured vision118. Keats bids Fancy roam119, and Andersen’s Ida delights in fancies her Councilor scorns120.
Dreams gather all these questions. The ancients often treat them as messages, while admitting they are hard to read. Penelope distinguishes true dreams from the gate of horn and false ones from the gate of ivory121. Clytemnestra’s serpent dream is interpreted as prophecy122. Pliny weighs whether dreams foretell events123, Plutarch’s lives are full of portents124, and Dante’s morning dreams bring tidings of the future125. In Bunyan, Mercy’s dream is interpreted as good126.
A countertradition seeks natural causes. Chaucer’s Pertelote ascribes dreams to bodily excess127. Hobbes ties fearful dreams to cold and explains Brutus’s apparition as a dream128. Burke explains the dream of falling by sudden bodily relaxation129. Augustine’s mother herself distinguished her vain fantasies from God’s revelations130. In Corneille, the Armenian scorns dreams while the Roman takes them for heaven’s warnings131.
The boldest question is whether waking itself is a dream. Descartes observes that waking thoughts may also occur in sleep132. Pascal finds waking distinguished only by continuity, life being a slightly less inconstant dream from which we may wake at death133,134. Calderón’s Segismund cannot tell copy from original and resolves to act well because life may be a dream135,136. Prospero’s insubstantial pageant extends the thought to the world137.
Apparitions keep the same ambiguity. Pliny suspects a terrified imagination138, Hamlet’s mother sees ecstasy139, and Hobbes sees creatures of fancy mistaken for substances140. Yet Cellini insists that he was not raving141.
Several questions remain open across these books. One is whether memory is decayed sense or a storehouse of truths sense never gave. Another is whether imagination is the mistress of error or the instrument of sympathy. A third is whether dreams speak from beyond us or only from the body. The ancients tend to locate memory’s depths in the soul and dreams’ meanings in the gods. The moderns tend to locate both in the brain, and then rediscover, with Wordsworth and Shelley, a creative power the analysis seemed to have dissolved.
Introductory essay written by Claude Opus 5.5 from the outline and the notes on every passage below; quotations are checked against this edition.
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