Many since Augustine have marvelled at the miracle of memory. None have expressed their admiration more eloquently. “Great is this force of memory”, he exclaims, “excessive great, O my God; a large and boundless chamber; who ever sounded the bottom thereof? Yet is this a power of mine, and belongs unto my nature; nor do I myself comprehend all that I am. Therefore is the mind too strait to contain itself. And where should that be which it containeth, not of itself? Is it without and not within? How then doth it not comprehend itself. A wonderful admiration surprises me, amazement seizes me upon this. And men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty billows of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, and pass themselves by; nor wonder that when I spake of all these things, I did not see them with my eyes, yet could not have spoken of them, unless I then actually saw the mountains, billows, rivers, stars, which I had seen, and that ocean which I believe to be inwardly in my memory, and that, with the vast spaces between, as if I saw them abroad. Yet did not I by seeing draw them into myself, when with mine eyes I beheld them; nor are they themselves with me, but their images only. And I know by what sense of the body, each was impressed upon me.” It is an interesting fact that Augustine noticed the possibility of illusions of memory. Certain rare phenomena—the so-called recollections of Pythagoras and others who were said to have remembered objects perceived in a former state of existence—he explains in a very modern fashion, except that he attributes @these@ beliefs to the agency of evil spirits. “For we must not”, he says, “acquiesce in their story who assert that the Samian Pythagoras recollected some things of this kind, which he had experienced when he was previously here in another body; and others @tell@ yet of others, that they experienced something of the same sort in their minds. But it may be conjectured that these were untrue recollections, such as we commonly experience in sleep, when we fancy we remember, as though we had done or seen it, when we never did or saw at all; and that the minds of these persons, even though awake, were affected in this way at the suggestion of malicious and deceitful spirits, whose care it is to confirm, or to sow some false belief concerning the changes of souls, in order to deceive men.”[44] If they truly remembered such things, he argues, such phenomena would not be as rare; but many persons would experience the same.