In all these
cases, ideas in the mind quickly fade, and often vanish quite out of
the understanding, leaving no more footsteps or remaining characters
of themselves than shadows do flying over fields of corn, and the mind
is as void of them as if they had never been there.
5. Causes of oblivion. Thus many of those ideas which were
produced in the minds of children, in the beginning of their
sensation, (some of which perhaps, as of some pleasures and pains,
were before they were born, and others in their infancy,) if the
future course of their lives they are not repeated again, are quite
lost, without the least glimpse remaining of them. This may be
observed in those who by some mischance have lost their sight when
they were very young; in whom the ideas of colours having been but
slightly taken notice of, and ceasing to be repeated, do quite wear
out; so that some years after, there is no more notion nor memory of
colours left in their minds, than in those of people born blind. The
memory of some men, it is true, is very tenacious, even to a
miracle. But yet there seems to be a constant decay of all our
ideas, even of those which are struck deepest, and in minds the most
retentive; so that if they be not sometimes renewed, by repeated
exercise of the senses, or reflection on those kinds of objects
which at first occasioned them, the print wears out, and at last there
remains nothing to be seen.
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