Hume says:--
"We find, by experience, that when any impression has been present
in the mind, it again makes its appearance there as an idea, and
this it may do in two different ways: either when, on its new
appearance, it retains a considerable degree of its first vivacity,
and is somewhat intermediate between an impression and an idea; or
when it entirely loses that vivacity, and is a perfect idea. The
faculty by which we repeat our impressions in the first manner, is
called the _memory_, and the other the _imagination_."--(I. pp. 23,
24.)
And he considers that the only difference between ideas of imagination
and those of memory, except the superior vivacity of the latter, lies
in the fact that those of memory preserve the original order of the
impressions from which they are derived, while the imagination "is free
to transpose and change its ideas."
The latter statement of the difference between memory and imagination is
less open to cavil than the former, though by no means unassailable.
The special characteristic of a memory surely is not its vividness; but
that it is a complex idea, in which the idea of that which is remembered
is related by co-existence with other ideas, and by antecedence with
present impressions.
If I say I remember A. B., the chance acquaintance of ten years ago, it
is not because my idea of A. B. is very vivid--on the contrary, it is
extremely faint--but because that idea is associated with ideas of
impressions co-existent with those which I call A.
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