How can this be done? We see that the impression of any action, to which we attach ourselves, remains. I may meet hundred of persons during the day, and among them meet also one whom I love; and when I retire at night, I may try to think of all the faces I saw, but only that face comes before the mind — the face which I met perhaps only for one minute,and which I loved; all the others have vanished. My attachment to this particular person caused a deeper impression on my mind than all the other faces. Physiologically the impressions have all been the same; every one of the faces that I saw pictured itself on the retina, and the brain took the pictures in, and yet there was no similarity of effect upon the mind.
Most of the faces, perhaps,were entirely new faces, about which I had never thought before,but that one face of which I got only a glimpse found associations inside. Perhaps I had pictured him in my mind for years,knew hundreds of things about him, and this one new vision of him awakened hundreds of sleeping memories in my mind; and this one impression having been repeated perhaps a hundred times more than those of the different faces together, will produce...