Joy and sorrow are not ideas of the mind, but affections of the will, and so they do not lie in the domain of memory.  We cannot recall our joys and sorrows; by which I mean that we cannot renew them.  We can recall only the ideas that accompanied them; and, in particular, the things we were led to say; and these form a gauge of our feelings at the time.  Hence our memory of joys and sorrows is always imperfect, and they become a matter of indifference to us as soon as they are over.  This explains the vanity of the attempt, which we sometimes make, to revive the pleasures and the pains of the past.  Pleasure and pain are essentially an affair of the will; and the will, as such, is not possessed of memory, which is a function of the intellect; and this in its turn gives out and takes in nothing but thoughts and ideas, which are not here in question.

It is a curious fact that in bad days we can very vividly recall the good time that is now no more; but that in good days, we have only a very cold and imperfect memory of the bad.

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We have a much better memory of actual objects or pictures than for mere ideas.  Hence a good imagination makes it easier to learn languages; for by its aid, the new word is at once united with the actual object to which it refers; whereas, if there is no imagination, it is simply put on a parallel with the equivalent word in the mother tongue.

Mnemonics should not only mean the art of keeping something indirectly in the memory by the use of some direct pun or witticism; it should, rather, be applied to a systematic theory of memory, and explain its several attributes by reference both to its real nature, and to the relation in which these attributes stand to one another.

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There are moments in life when our senses obtain a higher and rarer degree of clearness, apart from any particular occasion for it in the nature of our surroundings; and explicable, rather, on physiological grounds alone, as the result of some enhanced state of susceptibility, working from within outwards.  Such moments remain indelibly impressed upon the memory, and preserve themselves in their individuality entire.  We can assign no reason for it, nor explain why this among so many thousand moments like it should be specially remembered.  It seems as much a matter of chance as when single specimens of a whole race of animals now extinct are discovered in the layers of a rock; or when, on opening a book, we light upon an insect accidentally crushed within the leaves.  Memories of this kind are always sweet and pleasant.

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