This is memory, which is as it were the storehouse of
our ideas. For, the narrow mind of man not being capable of having
many ideas under view and consideration at once, it was necessary to
have a repository, to lay up those ideas which, at another time, it
might have use of. But, our ideas being nothing but actual perceptions
in the mind, which cease to be anything when there is no perception of
them; this laying up of our ideas in the repository of the memory
signifies no more but this,- that the mind has a power in many cases
to revive perceptions which it has once had, with this additional
perception annexed to them, that it has had them before. And in this
sense it is that our ideas are said to be in our memories, when indeed
they are actually nowhere;- but only there is an ability in the mind
when it will to revive them again, and as it were paint them anew on
itself, though some with more, some with less difficulty; some more
lively, and others more obscurely. And thus it is, by the assistance
of this faculty, that we are said to have all those ideas in our
understandings which, though we do not actually contemplate, yet we
can bring in sight, and make appear again, and be the objects of our
thoughts, without the help of those sensible qualities which first
imprinted them there.
3. Attention, repetition, pleasure and pain, fix ideas.
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