discourse which he
held the very day he died; for he there asserts that, any one, who
seeming to be entirely illiterate, is yet able to answer a question
well that is proposed to him, does in so doing manifestly show that he
is not learning it then, but recollecting it by his memory. Nor is it
to be accounted for in any other way, how children come to have notions
of so many and such important things as are implanted, and, as it were,
sealed up, in their minds (which the Greeks call [Greek: ennoiai]),
unless the soul, before it entered the body, had been well stored with
knowledge. And as it had no existence at all (for this is the
invariable doctrine of Plato, who will not admit anything to have a
real existence which has a beginning and an end, and who thinks that
that alone does really exist which is of such a character as what he
calls [Greek: eidea], and we species), therefore, being shut up in the
body, it could not while in the body discover what it knows; but it
knew it before, and brought the knowledge with it, so that we are no
longer surprised at its extensive and multifarious knowledge. Nor does
the soul clearly discover its ideas at its first resort to this abode
to which it is so unaccustomed, and which is in so disturbed a state;
but after having refreshed and recollected itself, it then by its
memory recovers them; and, therefore, to learn implies nothing more
than to recollect. But I am in a particular manner surprised at memory.
For what is that faculty by which we remember? what is its force? what
its nature? I am not inquiring how great a memory Simonides[13] may be
said to have had, or Theodectes,[14] or that Cineas[15] who was sent to
Rome as ambassador from Pyrrhus; or, in more modern times,
Charmadas;[16] or, very lately, Metrodorus[17] the Scepsian, or our own
contemporary Hortensius[18]: I am speaking of ordinary memory, and
especially of those men who are employed in any important study or art,
the great capacity of whose minds it is hard to estimate, such numbers
of things do they remember.

XXV. Should you ask what this leads to, I think we may understand what
that power is, and whence we have it. It certainly proceeds neither
from the heart, nor from the blood, nor from the brain, nor from atoms;
whether it be air or fire, I know not, nor am I, as those men are,
ashamed, in cases where I am ignorant, to own that I am so. If in any
other obscure matter I were able to assert anything positiv