nefited by the art of memory or the art of
forgetfulness.

Forgetfulness is necessary to remembrance. Ideas are retained by
renovation of that impression which time is always wearing away, and
which new images are striving to obliterate. If useless thoughts could
be expelled from the mind, all the valuable parts of our knowledge would
more frequently recur, and every recurrence would reinstate them in
their former place.

It is impossible to consider, without some regret, how much might have
been learned, or how much might have been invented, by a rational and
vigorous application of time, uselessly or painfully passed in the
revocation of events, which have left neither good nor evil behind them,
in grief for misfortunes either repaired or irreparable, in resentment
of injuries known only to ourselves, of which death has put the authors
beyond our power.

Philosophy has accumulated precept upon precept, to warn us against the
anticipation of future calamities. All useless misery is certainly
folly, and he that feels evils before they come may be deservedly
censured; yet surely to dread the future is more reasonable than to
lament the past. The business of life is to go forwards: he who sees
evil in prospect meets it in his way; but he who catches it by
retrospection turns back to find it. That which is feared may sometimes
be avoided, but that which is regretted to-day may be regretted again
to-morrow.

Regret is indeed useful and virtuous, and not only allowable but
necessary, when it tends to the amendment of life, or to admonition of
errour which we may be again in danger of committing. But a very small
part of the moments spent in meditation on the past, produce any
reasonable caution or salutary sorrow. Most of the mortifications that
we have suffered, arose from the concurrence of local and temporary
circumstances, which can never meet again; and most of our
disappointments have succeeded those expectations, which life allows not
to be formed a second time.

It would add much to human happiness, if an art could be taught of
forgetting all of which the remembrance is at once useless and
afflictive; if that pain which never can end in pleasure could be driven
totally away, that the mind might perform its functions without
incumbrance, and the past might no longer encroach upon the present.

Little can be done well to which the whole mind is not applied; the
business of every day calls for the day to which i