other side, I see the tender graces of infancy.  I join what subsists no more with what is still, without confounding these extremes.  I preserve I know not what, which, by turns, is all that I have seen since I came into the world.  Out of this unknown store come all the perfumes, harmonies, tastes, degrees, and mixtures of colours; in short, all the figures that have passed through my senses, and which they have trusted to my brain.  I revive when I please the joy I felt thirty years ago.  It returns; but sometimes it is not the same it was formerly, and appears without rejoicing me.  I remember I have been well pleased, and yet am not so while I have that remembrance.  On the other hand, I renew past sorrows and troubles.  They are present; for I distinctly perceive them such as they were formerly, and not the least part of their bitterness and lively sense escapes my memory.  But yet they are no more the same; they are dulled, and neither trouble nor disquiet me.  I perceive all their severity without feeling it; or, if I feel it, it is only by representation, which turns a former smart and racking pain into a kind of sport and diversion, for the image of past sorrows rejoices me.  It is the same with pleasures:  a virtuous mind is afflicted by the memory of its disorderly unlawful enjoyments.  They are present, for they appear with all their softest and most flattering attendants; but they are no more themselves, and such joys return only to make us uneasy.

Sect.  XLIX.  Two Wonders of the Memory and Brain.

Here, therefore, are two wonders equally incomprehensible.  The first, that my brain is a kind of book, that contains a number almost infinite of images, and characters ranged in an order I did not contrive, and of which chance could not be the author.  For I never had the least thought either of writing anything in my brain, or to place in any order the images and characters I imprinted in it.  I had no other thought but only to see the objects that struck my senses.  Neither could chance make so marvellous a book:  even all the art of man is too imperfect ever to reach so high a perfection, therefore what hand had the skill to compose it?

The second wonder I find in my brain, is to see that my mind reads with so much ease, whatever it pleases, in that inward book; and read even characters it does not know.  I never saw the traces or figures imprinted in my brain, and even the substance of my brain itself, which is like the paper of that book, is altogether unknown to me.  All those numberless characters transpose themselves, and afterwards resume their rank and place to obey my command.  I have, as it were, a divine power over a work I am unacquainted with, and which is incapable of knowledge.  That which understands nothing, understands my thought and performs it instantly.  The thought of man has no power over bodies:  I am sensible of it by running over all nature.  There is but one single body which my bare will moves, as if it were a deity; and even moves the most subtle and nicest springs of it, without knowing them.  Now, who is it that united my will to this body, and gave it so much power over it?