On Memory and ReminiscenceAristotle

On Memory and Reminiscence (De memoria et reminiscentia) is Aristotle's short treatise in the Parva Naturalia on how the past is retained and recovered. Memory, he argues, is neither perception nor thought. It is a state or affection of perception or thought, conditioned by the lapse of time. What is remembered is always of the past; there is no memory of the present as present. Memory belongs to the faculty of sense-perception by which we also perceive time. Many animals remember. The image retained is like an imprint, and remembering is taking that image as a likeness of something formerly perceived.

Reminiscence (or recollection) is different. It is an active search that moves through a chain of associated images toward what one seeks. Association proceeds by similarity, contrast, or contiguity. Recollection is peculiar to human beings; memory is not. Slow people, Aristotle notes, are often better at remembering, while quick learners are better at recollecting. The treatise closes the account of residual movements of perception that De Anima had left unfinished, and it supplies the psychology of past-directed awareness that later medieval and early modern theories of memory, including those of Aquinas and of the British empiricists, take as their classical starting point.