An Historical Sketch of the Conceptions of Memory among the Ancients — Edition Insights

From Crude Beginnings to Aristotle’s System

The first chapter, “Conceptions of Memory before Aristotle,” covers Ionian sensationalism, Pythagorean transmigration, and the physical explanations of Diogenes and Parmenides in just a few paragraphs. Burnham treats these as preliminary, noting that “we find no scientific study of the subject before Aristotle.” The pace is quick: the reader is given a series of thumbnail sketches, each tied to a surviving fragment or doxographical report. The effect is to establish a baseline of fragmentary, often bizarre theories against which Aristotle’s work will stand out as a leap in sophistication. Burnham does not linger on any single pre-Aristotelian figure; his interest is in the gradual emergence of a psychological vocabulary.

Augustine’s Interior Memory

The section on Plotinus and Augustine is the longest in the book, and Burnham’s treatment of Augustine is notably more expansive. He quotes Augustine’s Confessions at length, including the remark that “when I learned them I gave not credit to another man’s mind, but recognized them in mine.” Burnham emphasizes Augustine’s distinction between sense memory and intellectual memory, the latter storing not images but the things themselves, including the idea of truth and of God. He also highlights Augustine’s argument that much of what is attributed to perception is really memory, and his analysis of the will’s role in remembering and forgetting. The prose here becomes denser, mirroring Augustine’s own introspective style.

Pace as a Clue to Emphasis

The book’s structure reveals Burnham’s priorities. The first chapter races through centuries of thought in eleven pages; the second, on Aristotle, takes twenty-eight; the fourth, on Plotinus and Augustine, takes twenty-three. The final two chapters, on diseases of memory and ancient mnemonics, are only three pages each. This uneven distribution suggests that Burnham considered Aristotle and Augustine the two peaks of ancient memory theory. The later chapters on Stoics, Epicureans, Cicero, and Quintilian are compressed into six pages, treated as transitional. A reader attentive to pacing will see that Burnham is not writing a comprehensive survey but an argument about which thinkers made lasting contributions to the psychology of memory.

Burnham’s thesis is a work of intellectual history that rewards attention to its structure. The rapid summaries of early Greek theories give way to sustained analysis of Aristotle and Augustine, where the prose itself becomes more reflective. Readers interested in the history of psychology will find a clear, if dated, account of how ancient thinkers moved from physical explanations to introspective ones. The final chapters on memory disorders and mnemonics are brief but suggestive, hinting at practical concerns that later eras would explore in greater depth.

Burnham’s old thesis makes me think of how the ancients tried to pin down memory—elusive, like trying to hold water. There’s a quiet comfort in knowing that struggle is ancient. I sometimes wonder if Nietzsche felt that same tug, the pull between what we choose to remember and what we can’t help keeping. A strange kinship. Here’s Beyond Good and Evil — Text and Context, for whenever the mood strikes.