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. Thus the ideas, as well as children, of our youth, often die before us: and our minds represent
to us those tombs to which we are approaching; where, though the brass and marble remain, yet the inscriptions
are effaced by time, and the imagery moulders away. The pictures drawn in our minds are laid in fading colours;
and if not sometimes refreshed, vanish and disappear. How much the constitution of our bodies and the make of
our animal spirits are concerned in this; and whether the temper of the brain makes this difference, that in some it
retains the characters drawn on it like marble, in others like freestone, and in others little better than sand, I shall
not here inquire; though it may seem probable that the constitution of the body does sometimes influence the
memory, since we oftentimes find a disease quite strip the mind of all its ideas, and the flames of a fever in a few
days calcine all those images to dust and confusion, which seemed to be as lasting as if graved in marble.
