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Wellsprings
soul

Memory

μνήμη

A past affection, pressed like a seal into the soul's wax, that we read off now as an image stamped "before."

For the Greeks, memory was not a stored fact but a present image that carries a mark of pastness — we perceive it now, yet recognize it as belonging to something gone. Plato pictured the soul as a wax tablet on which experiences leave impressions, faint or sharp, true or smudged. Aristotle made the account more exact, arguing that memory belongs to the same image-forming part of the soul as perception, and is essentially of the past — distinguishing it from recollection, the active hunt to recover what one knew.

Where this idea shows up

8 Greek sources·1 Jewish-canon citation

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