ABSTRACT
F ranciscus de Oviedo, a 17th-century Jesuit, pondered many of Nature's deepest secrets. Amidst the formidable array of her many enigmas, one in particular seemed especially vexing—the process by which a dormant memory is brought into conscious awareness. To Oviedo, the phenomenon that he labeled “the excitation of species” constitutes “the very greatest mystery of all philosophy, never to be competently explained by human ingenuity.” The puzzled scholar detailed his reasons for expressing pessimism that the problem of species-excitation could ever be solved:
because we can neither discover the cause which, for example, in the recitation of an oration, excites the species in the order in which they are excited, nor the reason why often, when wishing to recollect a matter, we do not, whereas when not wishing to recollect it we sometimes do. Hence … Poncius says, that for the excitation of the species we must either recur at once to God, or to some sufficient cause, which, however, he does not specify
(cited in Hamilton, 1859, p. 228).