On the Improvement of the Understanding
If the duration be indefinite, the recollection is imperfect; this everyone seems to have learnt from nature. For we often ask, to strengthen our belief in something we hear of, when and where it happened; though ideas themselves have their own duration in the mind, yet, as we are wont to determine duration by the aid of some measure of motion which, again, takes place by aid of the imagination, we preserve no memory connected with pure intellect. [B.S.]