COGNITION OF INTELLIGIBLE OBJECTS STILL LESS ADMITS OF AN IMPRESSION.
The cognition of intelligible things still less admits of an experience or impression; for the soul finds the intelligible things within herself, while it is outside of herself that she contemplates sense-objects. Consequently the soul's notions of intelligible entities are actualizations of a nature superior to those of sense-objects, being the actualizations of the soul herself, that is, spontaneous actualizations. We shall however have to relegate to another place[229] the question whether the soul sees herself as double, contemplating herself as another object, so to speak, and whether she sees intelligence as single in a manner such that both herself and intelligence seem but one.
B. OF MEMORY.
MEMORY ACTS THROUGH THE SYMPATHY OF THE SOUL'S HIGHEST SELF.
3. Treating of memory, we must begin by attributing to the soul a power which, though surprising, is perhaps really neither strange nor incredible. The soul, without receiving anything, nevertheless perceives the things she does not have. The (secret of this) is that by nature the soul is the reason of all things, the last reason of intelligible entities, and the first reason of sense-objects.[230] Consequently the soul is in relation with both (spheres); by the intelligible things the soul is improved and vivified; but she is deceived by the resemblance which sense-objects bear to intelligible entities, and the soul descends here below as if drawn by her alluring charm. Because she occupies a position intermediary between intelligible entities and sense-objects, the soul occupies a position intermediary between them. She is said to think intelligible entities when, by applying herself to them, she recalls them. She cognizes them because, in a certain manner, she actually constitutes these entities; she cognizes them, not because she posits them within herself, but because she somehow possesses them, and has an intuition of them; because, obscurely constituting these things, she awakes, passing from obscurity to clearness, and from potentiality to actualization. For sense-objects she acts in the same way. By relating them to what she possesses within herself, she makes them luminous, and has an intuition of them, possessing as she does a potentiality suitable to (a perception of) them; and, so to speak, to begetting them. When the soul has applied the whole force of her attention to one of the objects that offer themselves to her, she, for a long while, thereby remains affected as if this object were present; and the more attentively she considers it, the longer she sees it.[231] That is why children have a stronger memory; they do not quickly abandon an object, but lingeringly fix their gaze upon it; instead of allowing themselves to be distracted by a crowd of objects, they direct their attention exclusively to some one of them. On the contrary, those whose thought and faculties are absorbed by a variety of objects, do not rest with any one, and do no more than look them over.