y material to our present purpose. We may draw inferences
from the coherence of our perceptions, whether they be true or false;
whether they represent nature justly, or be mere illusions of the
senses.

When we search for the characteristic, which distinguishes the memory
from the imagination, we must immediately perceive, that it cannot lie
in the simple ideas it presents to us; since both these faculties borrow
their simple ideas from the impressions, and can never go beyond these
original perceptions. These faculties are as little distinguished from
each other by the arrangement of their complex ideas. For though it be
a peculiar property of the memory to preserve the original order and
position of its ideas, while the imagination transposes and changes
them, as it pleases; yet this difference is not sufficient to
distinguish them in their operation, or make us know the one from the
other; it being impossible to recal the past impressions, in order to
compare them with our present ideas, and see whether their arrangement
be exactly similar. Since therefore the memory, is known, neither by
the order of its complex ideas, nor the nature of its simple ones; it
follows, that the difference betwixt it and the imagination lies in its
superior force and vivacity. A man may indulge his fancy in feigning
any past scene of adventures; nor would there be any possibility of
distinguishing this from a remembrance of a like kind, were not the
ideas of the imagination fainter and more obscure.

It frequently happens, that when two men have been engaged in any scene
of action, the one shall remember it much better than the other,
and shall have all the difficulty in the world to make his companion
recollect it. He runs over several circumstances in vain; mentions the
time, the place, the company, what was said, what was done on all sides;
till at last he hits on some lucky circumstance, that revives the whole,
and gives his friend a perfect memory of every thing. Here the person
that forgets receives at first all the ideas from the discourse of
the other, with the same circumstances of time and place; though he
considers them as mere fictions of the imagination. But as soon as the
circumstance is mentioned, that touches the memory, the very same ideas
now appear in a new light, and have, in a manner, a different feeling
from what they had before. Without any other alteration, beside that
of the feeling, they become immediately idea