From: Mary Inez Bogan, trans. Saint Augustine, The Retractactions, in "Fathers of the Church."

Chapter 7 (pp. 28-29):

(1) In the same city, I wrote a dialogue in which there is an investigation and discussion of many things pertaining to the soul: its origin, its nature, its quantity, the reason for its being given to the body, how it is affected on coming to the body, and how, on leaving the body. But since its quantity was discussed most carefully and most thoroughly in order that, if we could, we might show that it lacks corporeal quantity and yet is something great, the entire book receives its name from this one investigation: it is called On the Quantity of the Soul.

(2) A statement I made in this book: "It seems to me that the soul has brought all the arts with it and that what is called learning is nothing else than remembering and recalling," should not be so interpreted as if, according to this, I agree that the soul, at some time, has lived either in another body or elsewhere in a body or outside a body, and that previously, in another life, it has learned the responses it makes when questioned, since it has not learned them here. For, as we have already said above in this work, it can happen that this is possible, since the soul is intelligible by nature and is joined, not only to intelligible, but also to immutable things. It is so made and ordered that when it moves toward those things to which it is joined or toward itself, it can give true answers concerning these things to the degree that it sees them. To be sure, it has not brought all the arts with it in the same manner in which it has them within itself; for it can only speak about what it has learned here regarding the arts that pertain to the senses of the body, such as much of medicine, and all that falls under astrology. But when it has been questioned and reminded in the right way, either by itself or by another, in respect to those things which the intelligence alone comprehends, it is able to reply for the reason I have given.