About the author

Robert Hooke (1635–1703), curator of experiments for the Royal Society, was a natural philosopher, engineer and physicist, whose scientific, architectural and mechanical inventions and discoveries are too numerous to recount. He launched, for example, the discipline of optical microscopy with Micrographia (1665), a treatise on designing and using microscopes.

About the text

Before the Royal Society on 21 June 1682, Hooke presented a lecture entitled ‘An Hypothetical Explication of Memory: how the Organs made use of by the Mind in its Operation may be Mechanically understood’. This lecture is an anomaly in Hooke's scholarship. Despite conducting research into perception and vision, he never examined psychological matters prior to or after this lecture.

The arts of memory

Hooke's lecture reaches the outer limits of the memory arts, pushing them into the realm of early modern science. In effect, he situates Aristotelian recollection and the Ciceronian storehouse within the context of mechanistic philosophy. Notwithstanding his deference to the soul as a mental agent, he conceives of the faculty of memory as a material organ capable of measurement, going so far as to calculate the number of images or ideas that the typical brain records over a day and throughout a lifetime.

In the excerpt below, Aristotle's model of the chain of mental imagery furnishes Hooke with an explanation about how the brain estimates duration. Our brains do not ascertain the passage of time through the senses but through a string of images enfolded in the memory. Along the string, the distance between the most recent idea and the stored idea enables the mind to sense time elapsed.

Textual notes

Lectures of Light, section VII, in The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke (London, 1705), pp. 140–1.

‘An Hypothetical Explication of Memory’

The repository I conceive to be seated in the brain, and the substance thereof I conceive to be the material out of which these ideas are formed, and where they are also preserved when formed, being disposed in some regular order; which order I conceive to be principally that according to which they are formed, that being first in order that is first formed, and that next which is next, and so continually by succession from the time of our birth to the time of our death.