Augustine 400ish AD

Great is this power of memory, exceedingly great, O my God–a large and boundless inner hall! Who has plumbed the depths of it? Yet it is a power of mymind, and it belongs to my nature. But I do not myself grasp all that I am. Thus themind is far too narrow to contain itself. But where can that part of it be which itdoes not contain? Is it outside and not in itself? How can it be, then, that the mindcannot grasp itself? A great marvel rises in me; astonishment seizes me. Men goforth to marvel at the heights of mountains and the huge waves of the sea, thebroad flow of the rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the orbits of the stars, and yetthey neglect to marvel at themselves. Nor do they wonder how it is that, when Ispoke of all these things, I was not looking at them with my eyes–and yet I couldnot have spoken about them had it not been that I was actually seeing within, in mymemory, those mountains and waves and rivers and stars which I have seen, andthat ocean which I believe in–and with the same vast spaces between them as whenI saw them outside me. But when I saw them outside me, I did not take them intome by seeing them; and the things themselves are not inside me, but only theirimages. And yet I knew through which physical sense each experience had made animpression on me.

CHAPTER IX

And yet this is not all that the unlimited capacity of my memory storesup. In memory, there are also all that one has learned of the liberal sciences, andhas not forgotten–removed still further, so to say, into an inner place which is not aplace. Of these things it is not the images that are retained, but the thingsthemselves. For what literature and logic are, and what I know about how manydifferent kinds of questions there are–all these are stored in my memory as theyare, so that I have not taken in the image and left the thing outside. It is not asthough a sound had sounded and passed away like a voice heard by the ear whichleaves a trace by which it can be called into memory again, as if it were stillsounding in mind while it did so no longer outside. Nor is it the same as an odorwhich, even after it has passed and vanished into the wind, affects the sense ofsmell–which then conveys into the memory the image of the smell which is what werecall and re-create; or like food which, once in the belly, surely now has no tasteand yet does have a kind of taste in the memory; or like anything that is felt by thebody through the sense of touch, which still remains as an image in the memoryafter the external object is removed. For these things themselves are not put intothe memory. Only the images of them are gathered with a marvelous quickness andstored, as it were, in the most wonderful filing system, and are thence produced in amarvelous way by the act of remembering.

CHAPTER X

But now when I hear that there are three kinds of questions–“Whether athing is? What it is? Of what kind it is?”–I do indeed retain the images of thesounds of which these words are composed and I know that those sounds passthrough the air with a noise and now no longer exist. But the things themselveswhich were signified by those sounds I never could reach by any sense of the bodynor see them at all except by my mind. And what I have stored in my memory wasnot their signs, but the things signified.How they got into me, let them tell who can. For I examine all the gates of myflesh, but I cannot find the door by which any of them entered. For the eyes say, “Ifthey were colored, we reported that.” The ears say, “If they gave any sound, we gavenotice of that.” The nostrils say, “If they smell, they passed in by us.” The sense oftaste says, “If they have no flavor, don’t ask me about them.” The sense of touchsays, “If it had no bodily mass, I did not touch it, and if I never touched it, I gave noreport about it.”Whence and how did these things enter into my memory? I do not know. Forwhen I first learned them, it was not that I believed them on the credit of anotherman’s mind, but I recognized them in my own; and I saw them as true, took theminto my mind and laid them up, so to say, where I could get at them again wheneverI willed. There they were, then, even before I learned them, but they were not in mymemory. Where were they, then? How does it come about that when they werespoken of, I could acknowledge them and say, “So it is, it is true,” unless they werealready in the memory, though far back and hidden, as it were, in the more secretcaves, so that unless they had been drawn out by the teaching of another person, Ishould perhaps never have been able to think of them at all?

CHAPTER XI

Thus we find that learning those things whose images we do not take inby our senses, but which we intuit within ourselves without images and as theyactually are, is nothing else except the gathering together of those same thingswhich the memory already contains–but in an indiscriminate and confused manner–and putting them together by careful observation as they are at hand in thememory; so that whereas they formerly lay hidden, scattered, or neglected, theynow come easily to present themselves to the mind which is now familiar with them.And how many things of this sort my memory has stored up, which have alreadybeen discovered and, as I said, laid up for ready reference. These are the things wemay be said to have learned and to know. Yet, if I cease to recall them even for shortintervals of time, they are again so submerged–and slide back, as it were, into thefurther reaches of the memory–that they must be drawn out again as if new fromthe same place (for there is nowhere else for them to have gone) and must becollected [cogenda] so that they can become known. In other words, they must begathered up [colligenda] from their dispersion. This is where we get the wordcogitate [cogitare]. For cogo [collect] and cogito [to go on collecting] have the samerelation to each other as ago [do] and agito [do frequently], and facio [make] andfactito [make frequently]. But the mind has properly laid claim to this word[cogitate] so that not everything that is gathered together anywhere, but only whatis collected and gathered together in the mind, is properly said to be “cogitated.”

And he goes on and on! From his Confessions of Faith