Hugh of Saint Victor

Son, wisdom is a treasure and your heart the strongbox (arca). When you learn wisdom you are storing up good treasures for yourself: undying treasures, incorruptible treasures, which never grow old and never lose the look (species) of their brightness. In the treasuries of wisdom there are riches of many kinds, and in the strongbox of your heart there are many compartments (conditoria): gold is laid up in one place, silver in another, precious stones in another. The arrangement of order is the lighting-up of knowledge. Arrange and distinguish each thing in its own places (locis), these apart and those apart, so that you know what has been put here and what has been put there.

Confusion is the mother of ignorance and of forgetting; distinguishing (discretio), on the other hand, lights up the understanding and steadies the memory. You see the money-changer keeping different coins, and how he partitions a single purse by manifold division, so that one outer compass holds several cells inside it. For once the money and the coins have been divided up, each kind kept apart from the others, he arranges everything so that it is kept with its places (cum locis), so that the very distinction of the places may keep unmixed the division of the things thus divided. After this you see, when he lays money out and changes it, how his hand goes ready and unhindered wherever the nod of his will reaches it out, and how whatever he is to receive at request, or to hand over as promised, he brings out quickly, without delay, fitting, distinct and unconfused. And perhaps one and the same purse would be offering onlookers a laughable and quite astonishing marvel, pouring out so many unmixed kinds, if the cave itself, with its mouth opened, did not show so many hollows gaping inside. But as it is, that same distinction of places which does show them takes away, at one and the same time, the marvel of the thing from those who watch and the hindrance of doing it from the one who acts.

For, as we have already said, the distinguishing of things makes them evident; and the evidence of things lights up the mind both at once and in recognition, and steadies it in memory. Return then, my son, to your heart, and consider how you ought to arrange and store the precious treasures of wisdom in it, so that you may know each receptacle - for what, and along with what, you have put something in them to be kept. Arrange it in such an order that, when reason calls for it, you can easily find that thing by memory, know it by understanding, and bring it out in speech. This is the plan of arrangement that I set before you.

There are three ways in which the things one learns are to be distinguished in the mind: by number, by place (locus), and by time. In this way everything you hear you will both grasp easily once it is understood and keep long in memory, if you have learned to consider it according to this threefold distinction. I shall show point by point how this can be done.

First, on the distinguishing of number. Learn to contemplate in your mind the line (linea) of the natural number, running out from one to whatever length you please, as though stretched out before the eyes of your heart. Then, whenever you hear any number named, train yourself to bend your thought quickly to the place where the total closes it, as if to that point at which the number itself comes to its end at the top. For example: when you hear ten, contemplate the tenth point; when twelve, the twelfth, so that you take in the whole by its end; and so with the rest. Keep this way of thinking and this manner of imagining familiar and habitual, so that you may look, as if with your eyes, on the end and limit of all the numbers as on distinct arrangements of places (locorum dispositiones). And now hear how useful this way of considering is for learning.

For example: I want to fix the psalter in my memory word for word. This is what I do. First I consider how many psalms it has: I find a hundred and fifty. I learn them all in order, so that I know which is first, which second, which third, and so on. In this way I arrange them all in my heart in order on the line (linea) of the natural number; and when I have numbered each one in its own seat (sedes), where they are set out on its own line of the natural number, I attend to them at once in utterance and in thought, so that the same thing is present so far as the heart's gaze is concerned: Blessed is the man - the first psalm; Why have the nations raged - which is the second; Lord, how are they multiplied - which is the third. And I go over them more attentively in first, second and third place. And by this considering I press them on my heart with such wakeful attention that, when questioned, I can answer without hesitation - whether they are put to me in order, or with one or several skipped, or named in reversed and backward order - from the well-known arrangement of the places (locorum dispositio): which is first, which second, which third, the twenty-seventh, the forty-eighth, or whatever number the psalm may be.

The Scriptures show that this is how men have made their statements: whoever means to use the authority of some psalm will have said 'this in the sixty-third', 'this in the seventy-fifth', or 'it is written in whatever other psalm', in referring to it bringing out not the name but the number. Or do you suppose that, as often as they wanted to designate a psalm by its number, they turned over the pages, so that beginning there from the start of the volumes they could know which each of the psalms was? That labour would have been far too great for such a business: rather, he had the knowledge in his heart and held it by memory. That is how he had learned the number and the order of each one.

Once the psalms are known, I do with the beginnings of the verses in each single psalm what I did with the beginnings of the psalms in the whole psalter; and after that I hold the whole series easily in my heart verse by verse, once I have brought so great a length down to so small a compass and brevity by dividing and distinguishing the book itself into psalms, and then the psalm into verses. And the same thing can easily be seen in the psalms, or in other books that have fixed divisions.

But where the series of a reading runs on continuously, this very thing has to be done by art: that is, according to the reader's own judgement, wherever it will look most fitting, the whole series should first be divided into certain definite parts, and those again into others, and those again into others, until the whole length is drawn in so far that the mind can easily take it in piece by piece. For memory always delights both in shortness of extent and in fewness of number; and therefore, where the series of readings stretches out at length, it must first be divided into a few parts, so that what the mind cannot take in by extent it may at least take in by number; and again, when it is afterwards scattered into many by subdivision, it may be helped in each part by its smallness or brevity. There - you have seen what the distinguishing of number can do for learning.

Now see and consider what the distinguishing of place (locus) can do for the same thing. Have you never noticed how a boy, if he has changed his book too often while reading, can impress what he reads on his memory only with more difficulty? Why is this, unless because the heart's imagination, when it is scattered through the outer senses into so many shapes across different books, can keep no inward image (species) in being through which the memory might be steadied? For when it is forced to be shaped by all of them indiscriminately, one coming on top of another, and the later constantly blotting out the earlier, nothing stays homely or familiar, nothing that is held as certain by use and constant practice.

It is worth a great deal, then, for steadying the memory, that when we read a book we should try to impress on memory through the imagination not only the number and order of the verses or sentences, but also the very colour and shape, and at the same time the site and position of the letters: where we saw this and where that written, in which part, in which place - at the top, in the middle, at the foot - we looked at it set down, with what colour we saw the stroke of the letter or the decorated face of the parchment. I hold that this too does no little good for waking the memory:

namely, that we should attend, and not carelessly, to the things that come, so to speak, from outside, as circumstances (circumstantiae) of the matter: for example, when we call to mind the look and character, or the site, of the places (loca) where we heard this or that; and also the faces and bearing of the persons (personae) from whom we learned this and that; and anything else of the kind that is bound up with a given piece of business.

All this is indeed childish - and yet it is the sort of thing that can do children good. After the distinguishing of number and of place comes the distinguishing of time: that is, what was done earlier and what later, how much earlier and how much later, by how many years, how many months, how many days this precedes that, and another thing follows this. To this distinction belongs also being able to call the mind back, by way of the matter, to the memory of things from the quality of the time at which we learned this or that, when we remember that one thing was done at night and another by day, one in winter and another in summer, one under cloud and another under a clear sky.

All of this we have woven together as a kind of prelude, matching childish things to children, lest perhaps, despising these least rudiments of teaching, we should little by little begin to drain away. For the whole usefulness of teaching rests on memory alone; since, just as hearing has done no good to the man who could not understand, so understanding has been worth nothing to the man who both would not and could not retain. Hearing, then, has done good only so far as understanding followed, and understanding only so far as retaining followed. But there are certain foundations of knowledge which, if they have been firmly impressed on the memory, make everything else open up easily. These we set out beforehand on the page below, in the very order in which we want them planted in your mind through memory, so that whatever we afterwards build on top may be able to stand solid.

Every exposition of the divine Scriptures is handled according to a threefold sense: history (historia), allegory, and tropology, that is, the moral sense. History is the narration of things done (res gestae), expressed through the first signification of the letter. Allegory is when, through a deed of the history which is found in the sense of the letter, some other deed of past or present or future time is intimated. Tropology is when, in what we hear was done, we recognise what we ought to do. Hence tropology - that is, turned speech, or folded-back utterance - rightly got its name: because, of course, we turn the speech of someone else's narrative to our own instruction at the moment when, reading the deeds of others, we shape them into a pattern of living for ourselves.

But it is history that we have in hand now, as the foundation of all teaching, to be lodged in memory first. And since, as we said, memory delights in brevity, while the deeds of the ages are almost without number, we must gather out of them all a short summary of some kind, a foundation for the foundation as it were, that is, a first foundation which the mind can easily take in and keep in memory. There are three things on which knowledge of things done (res gestae) chiefly depends: that is, the persons (personae) by whom the deeds were done, and the places (loca) in which they were done, and the times (tempora) when they were done. Whoever holds these three in his memory will find that he has a good foundation, on which whatever he afterwards builds by reading he will take in quickly and without difficulty, and hold long in memory. All the same, he must hold it in memory in such a way, and make it homely and known by constant going-over, that his heart is ready to fit to it everything he hears, and to assign what he has learned here to everything he hears in due course, by a fitting distribution of place, time and person. And so, in the strongbox of the heart, time and number measure out the length; place spreads the strongbox out in breadth, so that everything else can then be arranged in its own places.

First, then, we shall set out the persons together with the times in such an order, running the line (linea) out lengthways from the beginning; then we shall mark in the places (loca) as well, as far as the capacity of an abridgement allows - what has been gathered out of the whole will be enough. Set yourself to this, then: that you impress what is written below on your memory in the manner and form of learning shown above, so that you can recognise the usefulness of my words from the point at issue, when you see how much it is worth to spend effort and study not on the hearing of the Scriptures or on talk alone, but on memory.