After noticing the boast of Hippias, in Plato, that he could The remarkable case of retention narrated by Muretus. repeat, upon hearing once, to the amount of five hundred words, he observes that this was nothing as compared with the power of retention possessed by Seneca the rhetorician. In his Declamations, Seneca, complaining of the inroads of old age upon his faculties of mind and body, mentions, in regard to the tenacity of his now failing memory, that he had been able to repeat two thousand names read to him, in the order in which they had been spoken; and that, on one occasion, when at his studies, two hundred unconnected verses having been pronounced by the different pupils of his preceptor, he repeated them in a reversed order, that is, proceeded from the last to the first uttered. After quoting the passage from Seneca, of which I have given you the substance, Muretus remarks, that this statement had always appeared to him. marvellous, and almost incredible, until he himself had been witness of a fact to which he never could otherwise have afforded credit. The sum of this statement is, that at Padua there dwelt, in his neighborhood, a young man, a Corsican by birth, and of a good family in that island, who had come thither for the cultivation of civil law, in which he was a diligent and distinguished student. He was a frequent visitor at the house and gardens of Muretus, who, having heard that he possessed a remarkable art, or faculty of memory, took occasion, though incredulous in regard to reports, of requesting from him a specimen of his power. He at once agreed; and having adjourned with a considerable party of distinguished auditors into a saloon, Muretus began to dictate words, Latin, Greek, barbarous, significant and non-significant, disjoined and connected, until he wearied himself, the young man who wrote them down, and the audience who were present; -"we were all," he says, "marvellously tired." The Corsican alone was the one of the whole company alert and fresh, and continually desired Muretus for more words;. who declared he would be more than satisfied, if he could repeat the half of what had been taken down, and at length he ceased. The young man, with his gaze fixed upon the ground, stood silent for a brief season, and then, says Muretus, "vidi facinus mirificissimum. Having begun to speak, he absolutely repeated the whole words, in the same order in which they had been delivered, without the slightest hesitation; numerous editions of his several treatises, his works have been republished in a collected form six several times; and the editor of the edition before the one at present [1837] in the course of publication, by Professor Frotscher of Leipzig, was Ruhnkenius, perhaps the greatest scholar of the eighteenth century. then, commencing from the last, he repeated them backwards till he came to the first. Then again, so that he spoke the first, the third, the fifth, and so on; did this in any order that was asked, and all without the smallest error. Having subsequently become familiarly acquainted with him, I have had other and frequent experience of his power. He assured me (and he had nothing of the boaster in him) that he could recite, in the manner I have mentioned, to the amount of thirty-six thousand words. And what is more wonderful, they all so adhered to the mind that, after a year's interval, he could repeat them without trouble. I know, from having tried him, he could do so after a considerable time (post multos dies). Nor was this all. Franciscus Molinus, a patrician of Venice, was resident with me, a young man ardently devoted to literature, who, as he had but a wretched memory, besought the Corsican to instruct him in the art. The hint of his desire was enough, and a daily course of instruction commenced, and with such success that the pupil could, in about a week or ten days, easily repeat to the extent of five hundred words or more in any order that was prescribed." "This," adds Muretus, "I should hardly venture to record, fearing the suspicion of falsehood, had not the matter been very recent (for a year has not elapsed), and had I not as fellow-witnesses, Nicolaus the son of Petrus Lippomanus, Lazarus the son of Francis Mocenicus, Joannes the son of Nicolaus Malipetrus, George the son of Laurence Contarenus-all Venetian nobles, worthy and distinguished young men, besides other innumerable witnesses. The Corsican stated that he received the art from a Frenchman, who was his domestic tutor." Muretus terminates the narrative by alleging sundry examples of a similar faculty, possessed in antiquity by Cyrus, Simonides, and Apollonius Tyanæus. Ruhnkenius unduly skeptical in regard to this case. Now, on this history, Ruhnkenius has the following note, in reference to the silence of Muretus in regard to the name of the Corsican: "Ego nomen hominis tam mirabilis, citius quam patriam requisiissem. Idque pertinebat ad fidem narrationi faciendam." This skepticism is, I think, out of place. It would, perhaps, have been warranted, had Muretus not done far more than was necessary to establish the authenticity of the story; and, after the testimonies to whom he appeals, the omission of the Corsican's name is a matter of little import. But I am surprised that one confirmatory circumstance has escaped so learned a scholar as Ruhnkenius, seeing that it occurs in the works of a man with whose writings no one was more familiar. Muretus and Paulus Manutius were correspondents, and Manutius, you must know, was a Venetian. Now, in the letters of Manutius to Muretus, at the date of the occurrence in question, there is frequent mention made of Molino, in whom Manutius seems to have felt much interest; and, on one occasion, there is an allusion (which I cannot at the moment recover so as to give you the precise expressions) to Molino's cultivation of the Art of Memory, and to his instructor.1 This, if it were wanted, corroborates the narrative of Muretus whose trustworthiness, I admit, was not quite as transcendent as his genius. He account of his unfortunate memory. LECTURE XXXI. THE REPRODUCTIVE FACULTY. — LAWS OF ASSOCIATION. IN Recapitulation. my last Lecture, I entered on the consideration of that faculty of mind by which we keep possession of the knowledge acquired by the two faculties of External Perception, and Self-consciousness; and I endeavored to explain to you a theory of the manner in which the fact of retention may be accounted for, in conformity to the nature of mind, considered as a self-active and indivisible subject. At the conclusion of the Lecture, I gave you, instar omnium, one memorable example of the prodigious differences which exist between mind and mind in the capacity of retention. Before passing from the faculty of Memory, considered simply as the power of conservation, I may notice two opposite doctrines, that have been maintained, in regard to the relation of this faculty to the higher powers of mind. One of these doctrines holds, that a great development of memory is incompatible with a high degree of intelligence; the other, that a high degree of intelligence supposes such a development of memory as its condition. Two opposite doctrines maintained in regard to the relations of Memory to the higher powers of mind. 1. That a great power of memory is incompatible with a high degree of intelligence. The former of these opinions is one very extensively prevalent, not only among philosophers, but among mankind in general, and the words - Beati memoria, expectantes judicium—have been applied to express the supposed incompatibility of great memory and sound judgment. There seems, however, no valid ground for this belief. If an extraordinary power of retention is frequently not accompanied with a corresponding power of intelligence, it is a natural, but not a very logical procedure, to jump to the conclusion, that a great memory 1 [Niethammer, Der Streit des Philanthropinismus und Humanismus, p. 294.] [Ausserdem sey es eine selbst Sprichwörtlich gewordene Erfahrung (beati memoria exspectant judicium), dass vorherrschende Gedachtnissfertigkeit der Urtheilshraft Abbruch thue. - ED.] This opinion refuted by facts. Examples of high intelligence and great memory. Joseph Scaliger. is inconsistent with a sound judgment. The opinion is refuted. by the slightest induction; for we immediately find, that many of the individuals who towered above their fellows in intellectual superiority, were almost equally distinguished for the capacity of their memory. I recently quoted to you a passage from the Scaligerana, in which Joseph Scaliger is made to say that he had not a good memory, but a good reminiscence; and he immediately adds, "never, or rarely, are judgment and a great memory found in conjunction." Of this opinion Scaliger himself affords the most illustrious refutation. During his lifetime, he was hailed as the Dictator of the Republic of Letters, and posterity has ratified the decision of his contemporaries, in crowning him as the prince of philologers and critics. But to elevate a man to such an eminence, it is evident, that the most consummate genius and ability were conditions. And what were the powers of Scaliger, let Isaac Casaubon, among a hundred other witnesses, inform us; and Casaubon was a scholar second only to Scaliger himself in erudition. "Nihil est quod discere quisquam vellet, quod ille (Scaliger) docere non posset: Nihil legerat (quid autem ille non legerat?), quod non statim meminisset; nihil tam obscurum aut abolitum in ullo vetere scriptore Græco, Latino, vel Hebræo, de quo interrogatus non statim responderet. Historias omnium populorum, omnium ætatum, successiones imperiorum, res ecclesiæ, veteris in numerato habebat: animalium, plantarum, metallorum, omniumque rerum naturalium, proprietates, differentias, et appellationes, qua veteres, qua recentes, tenebat accurate. Loeorum situs, provinciarum fines et varias pro temporibus illarum divisiones ad unguem callebat; nullam disciplinarum, scientiarumve graviorum reliquerat intactam; linguas tam multas tam exacte sciebat, ut vel si hoc unum per totum vitæ spatium egisset digna res miraculo potuerit videri." His great powers of memory testified to by Casaubon. 1 For intellectual power of the highest order, none were distinguished above Grotius and Pascal; and Grotius 2 and Pascal forgot nothing they had ever read or thought. Leibnitz and Euler were not less Grotius. Pascal. celebrated for their intelligence than for their memory, and both |