2

The operation of memory is retention and representation, not only of

things present, corporeal, and temporal, but also of past and future

things, simple and eternal. For memory retains the past by recalling it,

the present by receiving it, the future by foreseeing it. It retains the

simple, as the principles of continuous and discrete quantities - the point,

the instant, the unit - without which it is impossible to remember or to

think about those things whose source is in these. Nonetheless it retains

the eternal principles and the axioms of the sciences and retains them

eternally. For it can never so forget them while it uses reason that it

will not approve of them when heard and assent to them, not as though it

were perceiving them for the first time, but as if it were recognizing them

as innate and familiar, as appears when someone says to another, ''One must

either affirm or deny," or, "Every whole is greater than its part," or any

other law which cannot be rationally contradicted.

From the first actual retention of all temporal things, namely, of the

past, present, and future, it has the likeness of eternity whose

indivisible present extends to all times. From the second it appears that

it is not only formed from without by images [phantasms], but also by

receiving simple forms from above and retaining them in itself - forms which

cannot enter through the doors of the senses and the images of sensible

things. From the third it follows that it has an undying light present to

itself in which it remembers unchangeable truths. And thus, through the

operations of the memory, it appears that the soul itself is the image of

God and His likeness, so present to itself and having Him present that it

receives Him in actuality and is susceptible of receiving Him in potency,

and that it can also participate in Him.