first
imprinted them there.

3. Attention, Repetition, Pleasure and Pain, fix Ideas.

Attention and repetition help much to the fixing any ideas in the
memory. But those which naturally at first make the deepest and most
lasting impressions, are those which are accompanied with pleasure or
pain. The great business of the senses being, to make us take notice of
what hurts or advantages the body, it is wisely ordered by nature, as
has been shown, that pain should accompany the reception of several
ideas; which, supplying the place of consideration and reasoning in
children, and acting quicker than consideration in grown men, makes
both the old and young avoid painful objects with that haste which is
necessary for their preservation; and in both settles in the memory a
caution for the future.

4. Ideas fade in the Memory.

Concerning the several degrees of lasting, wherewith ideas are imprinted
on the memory, we may observe,--that some of them have been produced in
the understanding by an object affecting the senses once only, and no
more than once; others, that have more than once offered themselves
to the senses, have yet been little taken notice of: the mind, either
heedless, as in children, or otherwise employed, as in men intent only
on one thing; not setting the stamp deep into itself. And in some, where
they are set on with care and repeated impressions, either through the
temper of the body, or some other fault, the memory is very weak. In all
these cases, ideas in the mind quickly fade, and often vanish quite out
of the understanding, leaving no more footsteps or remaining characters
of themselves than shadows do flying over fields of corn, and the mind
is as void of them as if they had never been there.

5. Causes of oblivion.

Thus many of those ideas which were produced in the minds of children,
in the beginning of their sensation, (some of which perhaps, as of some
pleasures and pains, were before they were born, and others in their
infancy,) if in the future course of their lives they are not repeated
again, are quite lost, without the least glimpse remaining of them. This
may be observed in those who by some mischance have lost their sight
when they were very young; in whom the ideas of colours having been but
slightly taken notice of, and ceasing to be repeated, do quite wear out;
so that some years after, there is no more notion nor memory of colours
left in their minds, than in those of peopl