Produced by Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) An Historical Sketch of The Conceptions of Memory among the Ancients. Submitted as a Thesis by William H. Burnham, Candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. 1888. Table of Contents. I. Conceptions of Memory before Aristotle, pp. 1–11 II. Aristotle’s Conceptions of Memory, pp. 12–40 III. Conceptions of Memory among the Stoics and Epicureans, and in Cicero and Quintilian, pp. 41–46 IV. Conceptions of Plotinus and St. Augustine, pp. 47–70 V. Diseases of Memory mentioned by ancient writers, pp. 71–73 VI. Ancient Systems of Mnemonics, pp. 74–76 Memory. I. Mnemosyne, Hesiod tells us, was the mother of the Muses. Without speculating as some have done about the reasons for this myth it is interesting as showing an appreciation of the fundamental nature of memory and some sort of crude introspective psychology dating back possibly to pre-historic times. Before the art of writing was in common use men had to depend more largely than to-day upon their memories for preserving and transmitting their knowledge. It is not surprising, therefore, that the ancients put a high estimate upon memory before they began to theorize about its nature. There are, of course, allusions to memory in Homer and in the Hebrew Scriptures.[1] And occasionally one of the early Greek philosophers tries to explain some phenomenon of memory. But we find no scientific study of the subject before Aristotle. The psychology of the Ionian school of philosophers, as far as they can be said to have had any at all, was sensationalism. Their views of memory must be conjectured from the fundamental principles of their philosophy.