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Wonderful Feats of Memory It is such a fundamental law that the whole of Natural Philosophy is considered but a commentary on it. In morals, we are not in the habit of applying this principle: we are commonly so accustomed to regard all moral and mental occurrences as the results of chance, and as subject to no laws, that many at least admit the annihilation of that which once was a state of consciousness to be possible. Yet annihilation, absolute destruction, is as inadmissible in the moral as it is in the physical world; and but little reflection or reason is needed to see that as all phenomena are but states of some reality, of something that exists, the states may change into other states; but it is alike impossible for something to become nothing, or for nothing to become something.
Such a miracle can neither be conceived by reason nor justified by experience. We may, indeed, state such a proposition verbally; but so soon as we passed from words to things, from vagueness to precision from the imaginary to the real, we cannot form an idea of any such annihilation in the objective or the subjective world.
Nor are the considerations in favour of the indestructibility of our perceptions, ideas, and other phenomena of consciousness merely of a theoretical nature; there are also facts which, however strange they may appear at first sight, are very simple, if we bear in mind that in the mental world, as elsewhere, nothing perishes. Medical and psychological works cite numerous cases where languages apparently altogether forgotten or memories apparently effaced, are suddenly brought back to consciousness by a nervous disorder, by fever, opium, hashish, or simply by intoxication. Coleridge tells a story of a servant-maid, who, in a fever, spoke Greek, Hebrew and Latin.
It was found that this girl had lived with an old Protestant pastor; that it had been the old man's custom for years to walk up and down a passage in his house into which the kitchen door
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