Thinking WITH Memory
From what it knows the mind fashions things unknown.
From De animae ratione by Alcuin (died 804), quoted and annotated in The Craft of Thought (bold emphases mine):
It is more remarkable, that with respect to unknown things, if they come to our ears from reading or hearing something, the mind immediately fashions a figure of the unknown thing. So perhaps one of us might have formed in his mind an image of a putative Jerusalem: however greatly different the actuality may be, as his mind has fashioned [its image] for itself so [Jerusalem] will seem to him. . . . He does not imagine the actual walls and houses and squares of Jerusalem, but whatever he has seen in other cities known to him, these he fashions as being possibly like those in Jerusalem; from known shapes he fashions a thing unknown . . . Thus the human mind makes up images concerning each matter; from what it knows it fashions things unknown.
