ENQ. I would like to hear your arguments.
THEO. They are short and few. Yet when you take into consideration (_a_) the utter inability of the best modern psychologists to explain to the world the nature of _mind_; and (_b_) their complete ignorance of its potentialities, and higher states, you have to admit that this objection is based on an _a priori_ conclusion drawn from _primâ facie_ and circumstantial evidence more than anything else. Now what is “memory” in your conception, pray?
ENQ. That which is generally accepted: the faculty in our mind of remembering and of retaining the knowledge of previous thoughts, deeds and events.
THEO. Please add to it that there is a great difference between the three accepted forms of memory. Besides memory in general you have _Remembrance_, _Recollection_ and _Reminiscence_, have you not? Have you ever thought over the difference? Memory, remember, is a generic name.
THEO. Indeed, they are not—not in philosophy, at all events. Memory is simply an innate power in thinking beings, and even in animals, of reproducing past impressions by an association of ideas principally suggested by objective things or by some action on our external sensory organs. Memory is a faculty depending entirely on the more or less healthy and normal functioning of our _physical_ brain; and _remembrance_ and _recollection_ are the attributes and handmaidens of that memory. But _reminiscence_ is an entirely different thing. “Reminiscence” is defined by the modern psychologist as something intermediate between _remembrance_ and _recollection_, or “a conscious process of recalling past occurrences, but _without that full and varied reference_ to particular things which characterises _recollection_.” Locke, speaking of recollection and remembrance, says: “When an _idea again_ recurs without the operation of the like object on the external sensory, it is _remembrance_; if it be sought after by the mind, and with pain and endeavour found and brought again into view, it is _recollection_.” But even Locke leaves _reminiscence_ without any clear definition, because it is no faculty or attribute of our _physical_ memory, but an intuitional perception apart from and outside our physical brain; a perception which, covering as it does (being called into action by the ever-present knowledge of our spiritual Ego) all those visions in man which are regarded as _abnormal_—from the pictures suggested by genius to the _ravings_ of fever and even madness—are classed by science as having no _existence_ outside of our fancy. Occultism and Theosophy, however, regard _reminiscence_ in an entirely different light. For us, while _memory_ is physical and evanescent and depends on the physiological conditions of the brain—a fundamental proposition with all teachers of mnemonics, who have the researches of modern scientific psychologists to back them—we call _reminiscence_ the _memory of the soul_. And it is _this_ memory which gives the assurance to almost every human being, whether he understands it or not, of his having lived before and having to live again. Indeed, as Wordsworth has it: