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13. In the knowledge of all these temporal things which we have
mentioned, there are some knowable things which precede the acquisition
of the knowledge of them by an interval of time, as in the case of
those sensible objects which were already real before they were known,
or of all those things that are learned through history; but some
things begin to be at the same time with the knowing of them, just as,
if any visible object, which did not exist before at all, were to rise
up before our eyes, certainly it does not precede our knowing it; or
if there be any sound made where there is some one to hear, no doubt
the sound and the hearing that sound begin and end simultaneously. Yet
none the less, whether preceding in time or beginning to exist
simultaneously, knowable things generate knowl edge, and are not
generated by knowledge. But when knowledge has come to pass, whenever
the things known and laid up in memory are reviewed by recollection,
who does not see that the retaining them in the memory is prior in time
to the sight of them in recollection, and to the uniting of the two
things by will as a third? In the mind, howver, it is not so. For
the mind is not adventitious to itself, as though there came to itself
already existing, that same self not already existing, from somewhere
else, or did not indeed come from somewhere else, but that in the mind
itself already existing, there was born that same mind not already
existing; just as faith, which before was not, arises in the mind
which already was. Nor does the mind see itself, as it were, set up
in its own memory by recollection subsequently to the knowing of
itself, as though it was not there before it knew itself;
whereas,doubtless, from the time when it began to be, it has never
ceased to remember, to understand, and to love itself, as we have
already shown. And hence, when it is turned to itself by thought,
there arises a trinity, in which now at length we can discern also a
word; since it is formed from thought itself, will uniting both.
Here, then, we may recognize, more than we have hitherto done, the
image of which we are in search.
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