§ II.—CHAPTER XII.

COGNITIVE STRUCTURE IN MAN.

IN entering upon the subject of this chapter, it is perhaps especially necessary for us to disclaim any pretension of treating the subject by itself. Here, as throughout in these chapters, our object is only to exhibit the bearing of the facts with which we deal upon the illustration of the Divine perfections. To a scientific investigation of the facts by themselves it would be wholly absurd in us to pretend. We take them, for the most part, simply as they are presented to us by the labours of others, who have cultivated the respective sciences to which they relate. It is enough for us that they are recognised as facts, although in some cases they may admit of a higher scientific explanation than that which we give of them. Our only concern is to set forth their theistic meaning, neither mistaking, nor, if possible, exaggerating aught.

In regard to the facts treated of in this and the succeeding chapter, we can scarcely hope to be even so far successful. The pregnant interest of the facts, in our point of view, irresistibly 203prompted a survey of them; yet their subtlety, and the dire polemic which everywhere encompasses them, render such a mere summary survey as was at all compatible with our purpose peculiarly difficult. This, however, is to be kept in mind, that even where our statement and explanation of the fact may not be accepted, the theistic conclusion which we draw will, for the most part, remain untouched.

There is no fact more difficult than that which meets us on the threshold of the sphere of cognition, and constitutes its condition. Perception is, in truth, the eternal problem of philosophy, from the special solution of which systems take their divergent course after an obvious and consistent manner, passing on the one extreme to materialism, on the other to idealism.

Sensation in its lowest forms we formerly found to give, as its essential condition, a sentient self or subjective. Perception, in every case, gives not only a self, but also in correlation a not-self, an objective. The former draws and contains the field of apprehension within, the latter shuts it out from the sphere of self; no contrast or distinction being given in the former, distinction and contrast (apprehension of relation) being the characteristic of the latter.¹¹⁵¹¹⁵   Sir W. HAMILTON’S Appendix to Reid’s Works, p. 880. Only in this apprehension, “not merely of a fact, but of relations,” can cognition be properly said to begin. It is no longer simply consciousness, but consciousness expressing itself in an attitude of distinction from objective phenomena, the ego realising itself against the non-ego, and thereby becoming a centre of knowledge.

But what more specially makes the contents of this fact of perception, or initial moment of cognition? This is the metaphysical life question, ceaseless in its stir. The old controversies die away, but from their ashes there spring up only higher and intenser forms of the problem.¹¹⁶¹¹⁶   This question has again arisen in the sphere of our British philosophy, under the handling of one of the most finely speculative minds that ever entered this field of high debate. In Professor Ferrier’s Institutes of Metaphysic the latest doctrine of psychology, which had gained such general acceptance, has been set aside as not only incomplete, but vicious as a basis of speculation. With Mr Ferrier’s special doctrine it would be out of place here to meddle. We have no doubt, however, that the subtlety and depth of metaphysical genius which his work betrays, its rare display of rigorous and consistent reasoning, and the inimitable precision and beauty of its style on almost every page, must secure for it a distinguished place in the history of philosophical discussion. Meanwhile, in its secret depths the fact evermore is born, and goes forth an intelligible presence into the world of reality, however we may explain or give an account of it.

On any admissible explanation, we have in perception, according to what we have already stated, self and not-self, the ego and non-ego, in clear distinction, and yet in indissoluble relation. The correlation is in the perceptive act inseparable, while its factors are distinguishable. The one stands face to face with the other, and equally with the other attests itself. The reality in cognition is, therefore, ever twofold—subject and object; and in this twofold reality we have for the first time the full manifestation of mind—self-consciousness not merely gazing outward upon the objective world (as in the brute), but realising itself as distinct from and above the world.

And viewed in reference to our subject, what a marvellous 205reality is this! With what fresh emphasis does it enunciate the inexhaustible energy of the great creative Source! What a new and beautiful utterance of Divine wisdom is it!—its very “image” deposited within the conditions of time and space! What a field of display for the Divine goodness does it open up! We cannot conceive it doubted that the fact of perception is thus validly pregnant with theistic significance. If, in the various organs of sense, the exquisite complicacy and delicacy of the nervous system, we recognise the clear manifestation of creative design, no less surely must we recognise it in the wonderful mental capacity to which these minister. For it is only in the exercise of the mind in perception that all the sensitive apparatus finds its highest purpose and fulfilment. All the marvel of its intricate and beautiful mechanism is only, in the last respect, for mind’s service. In perception the mind appropriates and adjusts every lower organ and function for its own nobler spiritual uses. Surely, therefore, we must here recognise a farther token of creative presence and skill.

The subjective and objective being brought face to face in perception, a continued mental activity is the result. The mind is continually taking in impressions through the avenue of the senses. It is obvious, however, that without some further attribute, this mental activity would have little availed. Incessantly as it was quickened it would have expired—the old impressions yielding to new ones ever presenting themselves. Knowledge, in any true sense, would thus have been impossible. Whatever might have been the liveliness or the range of perception, the mind 206could never have been truly cognitive without a power of acquisition.

In the human mind a preservative power seems to emerge consentaneously with the presentative in perception. The mind not only perceives, but retains. This is one of the elements of the complex faculty which philosophers generally have denominated memory, the other element being specifically known as recollection.¹¹⁷¹¹⁷   “This faculty,” says Dugald Stewart, who presents a very clear and thorough analysis of it according to its twofold conception, “implies two things—a capacity of retaining knowledge, and a power of recalling it to our thoughts when we have occasion to apply it to use. The word memory is sometimes employed to express the capacity, and sometimes the power.”—Philosophy of the Human Mind, vol. i. p. 404. There seems, however, good reason for confining the appellation of memory to the simple power of retention, which undoubtedly must be considered an original aptitude of the mind, irresolvable into any other. The power of recalling the preserved impressions seems, on the other hand, rightly held to be only a modified exercise of the suggestive or reproductive faculty, which next falls under our notice. This is well known as the view of Dr Thomas Brown, in the establishment of which he considered he had destroyed all the claims of memory to be regarded as an original faculty of mind. But that his subtlety was so far at fault, is evident from the simple fact that, apart from the mind’s capacity of retention, of which he takes no account, the suggestive or associative faculty would have no material whereon to operate.

The best claim of this power of retention to be reckoned an original element of mind is seen in its primary and fundamental 207importance. Apart from it, mind might have been a continued, but it would necessarily have been an aimless and futile activity. Consciousness would have been incessantly born only to expire—a mere series of intense bewilderment. But a simple power of retention was not all that was necessary. It required to be, for the purposes of knowledge, the very kind of retention which we actually possess; the power, for example, not only of preserving impressions, but of preserving them beyond the immediate sphere of consciousness—storing them away, as it were, within a secret repository, whence they can with more or less facility be drawn by the operation of the suggestive faculty. This is a very important feature of memory which has been too little noticed. It is obviously the condition at once of order and repose among our ideas. Otherwise, with even an inconceivably higher range of attention than we now possess, we must have been utterly oppressed by the commingling and hurrying crowd of our perceptions. They would have been ever in presence, so many petitioners, incessantly and with equal eagerness soliciting our regard, and overwhelming us with their anxious suit. Consciousness must have sunk under its intolerable burden. It would have been no longer, indeed, a brief ever-vanishing impulse, but a too vivid agony. The mental energy must have perished under the thronging rush of its recipients, like the maid of Roman story under the shields of the invaders admitted into her fortress.¹¹⁸¹¹⁸   This comparison, which seemed to us as sufficiently fitting, is not our own, but to whom it belongs we cannot exactly say. It is willingly conceded to any one who puts in a valid claim for it. What a truly admirable provision, therefore, is this power 208of retention! In describing it, we have necessarily set forth at the same time its useful and beneficent character.

We cannot pass away from it without noticing shortly its dependence upon attention, and the interesting use and value of this mental capacity—which is not yet to be reckoned, as it has sometimes been, a separate faculty, so much as the mere attitude or energy of the soul in every other faculty. Even in sensation, which most of all might be supposed independent of attention, we found that a distinct act of it was put forth. This mental attitude is, however, especially related to the faculty of retention, conditioning it to such a degree as to be apt even to be confounded with it. This dependence of memory upon attention has been noticed by all our philosophical writers.¹¹⁹¹¹⁹   STEWART’S Philosophy of the Human Mind, vol. i. p. 106 et seq.; LOCKE On the Human Understanding, vol. i. chap. x. Our degree of retention seems, in fact, to be exactly proportioned to our degree of attention. The more intense the attitude of the mind towards any object in the first place, the more fixed the impression retained of it. And thus it is we readily account for the strong and ineradicable impressions made by those objects which have interested the passions and drawn forth the whole soul.

The importance and value of this mental capacity are abundantly obvious. It may be said to underlie our whole mental being, as the condition of its culture and progress, imparting to it that ever-quickening spur which carries it onwards to new triumphs, and, to a large extent, those varying measures of development which it manifests in different 209individuals. All science is its product; and life owes to it all its interest and joy. It is, alone, its incessant operation from infancy—filling the storehouse of memory with the familiar images of parents and brothers and sisters—which binds together family ties, and strengthens all family love.¹²⁰¹²⁰   Although we had the capacity of retaining knowledge, if this capacity were not, as it is, in proportion to attention, one impression would have been as good and effectual as a thousand, and all family union and recognition would thus have been impossible. Any face would have been just as distinguishable, or rather as indistinguishable, to a child, as the faces of its parents.

The mind having apprehended in perception and laid up in memory the objects of knowledge, it was obviously necessary that it should possess a power of recalling or reproducing these objects, in order that its knowledge should be serviceable to it. Stored away irrevocably beyond the sphere of consciousness, they had as well never have been laid up. We have seen how requisite a provision it is that they should lie beyond this sphere, in order to leave the mind at liberty to occupy itself with other objects continuing to solicit it; but it is clear that if thus for ever laid away, our stores of perception could never have become to us stores of experience, and mere accumulation never have quickened into living knowledge. We have, therefore, the power of recalling our past impressions. This we are enabled to do in virtue of that great principle of our mental constitution familiarly known as the association of ideas, but more correctly expressed as our suggestive or reproductive faculty. There is none of our mental faculties which has in later times engaged more study than this—none 210which has at all times excited more marvel, and prompted more curious inquiry.

The process of reproduction takes place according to laws which have been variously enumerated and described, and the honour of first generalising which has been sometimes attributed to one or other of our modern philosophers—to Hobbes, Locke, and Hume. Sir W. Hamilton,¹²¹¹²¹   Vide Appendix to Reid’s Works, Note D. however, has recently claimed this honour for Aristotle, whose generalisation is not only first in time, but also, in his view, the most correct and comprehensive. These laws are generally reckoned at least four in number,—viz., the law of similarity, the law of contrast or correlation, the law of co-adjacency (contiguity in time and place), and what Sir William Hamilton has called under protest, the law of preference, meant to include Brown’s secondary laws of suggestion. Under the operation of one or other of these laws our mental activity proceeds, and all our mental experience is accumulated. Through them order is introduced into what would otherwise be the mere chaos of mental succession, and the way, as it were, is cleared for the emergence of those higher activities which carry forward our intellectual development. Each mind receives its peculiar tone, and enters upon its peculiar education, under their influence.

Putting out of view the fourth of these laws, which is obviously distinct, and not indeed properly expressive of a principle of mental succession, but only of a determining accident 211of it,¹²²¹²²   It expresses the relation not between mental phenomena in themselves, but between the individual mind and any series of such phenomena. It is a determining accident of association, therefore, rather than an inherent principle or law of it. it seems possible to reduce the other three to one fundamental law or principle, which may be defined as that whereby the mind, in all its efforts, completes a circle of thought—in other words, brings a whole into all its representations. The special laws mentioned seem all capable of being regarded as merely particular modes of the operation of this one great law of integration. If we suppose, as an example of the first, the case of one face, from some point of likeness in it, suggesting another, let us see what is the mental process which takes place. The mind, on apprehending the particular point of resemblance in the face before it, immediately begins to complete the image thereby recalled. It feels that it has got a part of a whole formerly familiar to it, and its immediate aim is to bring into view that whole. In ordinary instances the image completes itself instantaneously, and we are not therefore conscious of any such aim; but, in some instances, it is only after frequent efforts that it does so (as when we see a face resembling some one that we cannot yet recall), and then we become distinctly conscious of the reproductive operation. The eye, or mouth, or whatever part of the strange face is recognised as familiar, is fixed upon by the mind, and becomes the centre of a representative picture which the mind has no satisfaction till it has completed. In the case of the law of contrast, as when night suggests day, good 212evil, a dwarf a giant, the mental process is still more obviously of this integrating character.¹²³¹²³   Sir W. Hamilton calls this law specially the law of relativity or integration.—Vide Appendix to Reid’s Works, Note D, p. 911. For, in fact, the one mental conception here directly involves the other, and is only fully intelligible in relation to it. Each idea is to us only what it is, on account of its opposite. In passing from the one to the other, therefore, the mind is simply completing the complex image, one side of which is always the necessary correlate of the other. The same seems to hold equally true of the law of co-adjacency, as when a certain house recalls the friends we met—the conversation we had in it; or when one event recalls another which happened at the same time. In both cases the mental process obviously consists in the completion from a fragmentary of a total representation, previously laid up in the storehouse of memory.

When the train of association is once started (the integrating process once begun), it proceeds throughout in the same way. Every successive representation called up, still surrounds itself with another as part of a further whole. It is often the very slightest bond—so slight as to escape, at the moment, detection—that unites the successive evolutions of the mental panorama. In one mind, moreover, association will take place by deeper and more remote, in another, by more common and palpable, analogies. Mental refinement is really nothing else than the facile play of association round the more subtle and recondite characteristics of things—their more hidden and beautiful relations. It is 213simply the exquisite edge imparted by discipline to the reproductive faculty.

In speaking thus of the process of reproduction as throughout of an integrating character, it may be necessary to guard against our being supposed to say that the mind necessarily impresses a whole upon all the successive train of its ideas. This, on the contrary, we know it frequently does not do, the last link in the train having often no relation to the first as parts of a common whole. Mental succession is not unfrequently, as in reverie, a mere straggling array of scattered images. The integration does not proceed, as it is not necessary that it should, all along its course, but only from step to step. The general train may thus present a very incongruous mixture of ideas, while it has yet, at every step, strictly obeyed the great law of mental development. We may further observe that it is not necessary, as we might be apt to think from a first confused conception of the law, that the facts of a train of association should have previously coexisted in the mind. In some cases they have coexisted, and to this fact of their coexistence is owing their tendency to reproduce one another; but more frequently they have had no such previous alliance in the mind. An object never before perceived may suggest an old familiar object; while, again, an object frequently perceived, may suggest, in different moments, very different and even quite new trains of thought. Were it not for this characteristic of the principle of association, the field of our knowledge would have been comparalively 214narrow, confined as it must have been to the relations which, from actual observation, we had stored up in our minds. We would never have been able to get out of the past wheel or circle of our thoughts. As it is, the suggestive capacity, continually started by everything around us, is in all active and cultivated minds ever entering on fresh fields of intellectual interest, and acquiring fresh stores of knowledge.

Altogether, there is, perhaps, no part of our intellectual condition of which the beneficial use and beauty are more conspicuous. Apart from it, life could have possessed no individual interest; and the continual flow of consciousness could never have become concentrated and quickened into special cultivation and happiness. In the language of Dr Thomas Brown, “It is the suggesting principle, the reviver of thoughts and feelings which have passed away, that gives value to all our other powers and susceptibilities, intellectual and moral,—not, indeed, by producing them, for, though unevolved, they would still, as latent capacities, be a part of the original constitution of our spiritual nature—but by rousing them into action, and furnishing them with those accumulating and inexhaustible materials which are to be the elements of future thought, and the objects of future emotion. Every talent by which we excel, and every vivid feeling which animates us, derive their energy from the suggestions of this ever-active principle. We love and hate; we desire and fear; we use means for obtaining good and avoiding evil, because we remember the objects and occurrences 215which we have formerly observed, and because the future, in the similarity of the successions which it presents, appears to us only a prolongation of the past.

“In conferring on us the capacity of these spontaneous suggestions, then, Heaven has much more than doubled our existence; for without it, and consequently without those faculties and emotions which involve it, existence would scarcely have been desirable. The very importance of the benefits which we derive from it, however, renders us, perhaps, less sensible of its value; since it is so mingled with all our knowledge, and all our plans of action, that we find it difficult to conceive a state of sentient being of which it is not a part, and to estimate, consequently, at a just amount the advantage which it affords. The future memory of perception seems to us almost implied in perception itself; and to speculate on that strange state of existence which would have been the condition of man if he had been formed without the power of remembrance, and capable only of a series of sensations, has at first an appearance almost of absurdity and contradiction, as if we were imagining conditions which were in their nature incompatible. Yet, assuredly, if it were possible for us to consider such a subject a priori, the real cause of wonder would appear to be, not in the absence of the suggestions of memory, as in the case imagined, but in that remembrance of which we have the happy experience. When a feeling of the existence, of which consciousness furnishes the only evidence, has passed away so completely that not even the slightest consciousness of it remains, it would 216surely, but for that experience, be more natural to suppose that it had perished altogether, than that it should, at the distance of many years, without any renewal of it by the external cause which originally produced it, again start, as it were of itself, into being. To foresee that which has not yet begun to exist, is in itself scarcely more unaccountable than to see as it were before us what has wholly ceased to exist. The present moment is all of which we are conscious, and which can strictly be said to have a real existence, in relation to ourselves. That mode of time which we call the past, and that other mode of time which we call the future, are both equally unexisting. That the knowledge of either should be added to us, so as to form a part of our present consciousness, is a gift of Heaven, most beneficial to us, indeed, but most mysterious, and equally, or nearly equally, mysterious, whether the unexisting time of which the knowledge is indulged to us be the future or the past.”¹²⁴¹²⁴   Lectures, tenth edit., p. 217-218.

Nor is the Divine wisdom and benevolence alone manifest in the simple power bestowed upon us of reproducing our former thoughts and feelings, but especially in the actual mode of their reproduction, according to certain definite laws. This definiteness in the procedure of the suggestive faculty is the sole condition of our being able to apply our experience, and to make continued progress in the pursuit of knowledge. It alone enables us to devise plans of acquisition, and to calculate upon the results of education. Without it, we might have enjoyed, in the power of reproduction, a variety 217of feeling, but it could have been of no use either for our happiness or our cultivation. “He who has given us, in one simple principle, the power of reviving the past, has not made His gift so unavailing. The feelings which this wonderful principle preserves and restores, arise, not loosely and confusedly, but according to general laws or tendencies of succession, contrived with the most admirable adaptation to our wants, so as to bring again before us the knowledge formerly acquired by us, at the very time when it is most profitable that it should return. A value is thus given to experience, which otherwise would not be worthy of the name; and we are enabled to extend it almost at pleasure, so as to profit, not merely by that experience which the events of nature, occurring in conformity with these general laws, must at any rate have afforded to us, but to regulate this very experience itself, to dispose objects and events so that, by tendencies of suggestion on the firmness of which we may put perfect reliance, they shall give us, perhaps at the distance of many years, such lessons as we may wish them to yield, and thus to invent and create, in a great measure, the intellectual and moral history of our future life, as an epic or dramatic writer arranges at his will the continued scenes of his various and magnificent narrative.”¹²⁵¹²⁵   BROWN’S Lectures, tenth edit., p. 218.

In our analysis of the cognitive structure in man we have now reached an important stage. We have marked the great facts of perception, memory, and suggestion, in their respective bearings on our subject. In the first, we have seen the 218mind presentative or intuitive (the subject standing face to face with the objective reality in perception), in the second, retentive, in the third, representative. It is desirable to notice the peculiar advance of the mental capacity in this third stage. It is no longer the immediate facts of nature with which it deals. It is no longer directly conversant with the objective realities everywhere obtruded upon it, but with its own reconstructions of these realities. It is not the thing itself any more which the mind has before it, but an image or representation of it. It has, as it were, freed itself from the presence of the outward world, and begun to construct for itself a new world of ideas. Here, therefore, it enters into a far higher sphere of activity than before.

From this point of advance the intellectual energy rapidly develops into those various forms which have been sometimes treated as so many separate faculties. In all of them there is simply displayed, in a variety of modes and applications, the power of representation, or of forming ideas. It will only be necessary for us to indicate the two main directions which the mind assumes in these its higher productive stages. These are, the understanding and the imagination.

The mind having, in the process of reproduction, attained a series of images or ideas of its past objects of perception, immediately begins to bring these ideas into relation to one another. This it does in different ways; by fixing, for example, upon points of resemblance among its ideas, and out of these resemblances constituting a new general idea,—as when, from 219several representations of individual men, we attain to the general idea of man—a process well known as generalisation; or, again, by separating from different objects held in contemplation some specific quality, and making of it a new idea,—as when we recognise different objects as white or cold, &c., the common property of whiteness or coldness being constituted into a separate idea—a process equally well known as abstraction. The mental act here, it is obvious, is not simply reproductive, but specially productive. In the exercise of association the mind has already left behind the actual objective world, to concern itself with its own ideas, or reconstruction of that world. But these ideas yet directly represent the original realities: the one looks back to the other. Here, however, in the processes of generalisation and abstraction, the mind no longer looks beyond its own forms or notions. Its ideas, from being mere representations of past objects of perception, become, irrespective of all reference to such objects, fixed mental possessions, which we contemplate by themselves, and by which we carry on trains of reasoning.

It is necessary to state, however, that an indispensable preliminary to this advance of intelligence is the power of language,—a power which even emerges on the lower sphere of simple representation, and is requisite to its development to any extent. Without such a power, the mind might construct representations of the objects of its past experience, as is clearly done by the lower animals, but it could not hold them before it freely when separated from experience. It could not freely entertain and make use of its ideas without 220a power of embodying them in signs.¹²⁶¹²⁶   See MORELL’S Elements of Psychology, p. 183-184, in which the peculiar functions of what he calls the sematic power are exhibited with great clearness, and to which the writer has, in these few paragraphs on the understanding, been considerably indebted. And especially it could not, apart from signs, begin that process of comparison among its ideas which constitutes the special function of the understanding. It is only when the mind has, through the aid of language, fixed its representations, and given them, so to speak, a new objectivity within its own realm, that it can deal with them entirely by themselves, and, apart altogether from the outward world, carry on that higher course of activity which we peculiarly denominate thought.

The parallel range of mental activity, which we have named imagination, is one in which the mind is still more eminently productive. The term imagination, we are aware, is often applied to a lower degree of mental power; but we think that it is far more appropriately confined to that higher energy which, while dealing directly with sensible images, and so far standing on a lower intellectual platform than the understanding, yet even, in its ordinary flights, carries with it often all the special activities of the understanding—abstracting and generalising and classifying its appropriate objects, as it weaves them into new forms of interest or beauty.¹²⁷¹²⁷   This would seem to imply that the imagination can only be rightly treated after the logical faculty whose special process it presupposes. And this we apprehend to be the truth. Mr Morell, in his recent work—admirable in many respects—has not, according to our view, sufficiently distinguished imagination. The term is applied by him to two mental processes, the lower of which appears to be simply equivalent to what Stewart called conception, or the power we possess of holding our ideas before us, separated from all immediate reference to place or time; and the higher (which he calls productive or creative imagination) is with him apparently nothing else than the general process whereby the mind associates its ideas. This confusion of imagination with the general power of association is, it appears to us, quite mistaken. For the process of the recovery of our ideas, transacted under the guide of the laws of association, does not necessarily involve a special creative element. The mind may, in this process, be simply recollective, although, no doubt, it often also is eminently productive. Association may in any case, therefore, readily pass into imagination. Yet in all cases imagination is something specific and superior; rightly ranking even above the understanding, because carrying up the processes of the latter into all its more characteristic and important exercises. It is this formative or 221creative element, certainly, which is the constitutive one of imagination in the highest sense. It may not inaptly be considered to be the mental energy in its greatest heat of productivity; not merely, as in argumentation, constructing within the province of the abstract, building up some linked structure of sequential beauty; but constructing within the province of the possible, and building up some “sunny dome,” outmatching the most subtle combinations of the understanding. It is impossible for any to attend for a moment to the simplest exercise of imagination, as it transacts itself even in those day-dreams which almost all have, without perceiving that the main element of the exercise is thus creative. The imaginative process is also an intensely vivid one; but it is not, as some have thought, its vivacity which pre-eminently distinguishes it from other phases of mental representation. This is merely the gleam which the mental wheel emits in its glowing activity—the flash of the intensely-quickened formative process. But it is the formative element itself, and not its attendant light, which constitutes imagination. It is the gift of creation which makes the painter and the poet,—the workmen of the 222imagination. The vivacity is merely the bright accompaniment of the gift.

There is thus a striking alliance, and an equally striking diversity, between the mental powers of ratiocination and imagination. The one gives us science, the other art. The one is the organ of discovery, the other of inventiveness, in the noblest sense. The one deals with notions (concepts), the other with images (pictures), conveyed through the medium of the senses. From the intimate connection of imagination with the senses, making them, as it does, directly tributary in its highest workings—whereas the mind, in reasoning, ranges only among its pure ideas—the former might be supposed to be the lower faculty. Yet, from the spiritual regions into which imagination can carry its flights, it undoubtedly asserts for itself the loftier place and dignity in the end. It enters into the infinite, which is throughout a forbidden sphere to the understanding; and, mediating between the appropriate inspirations of spirit and of sense, the minister of both, it only reaches its true glory when clothing the lower intuitions in the celestial garment of the higher.

In reverting, in conclusion, to their specific bearing on our subject, how powerfully do both these forms of mental energy express the Divine wisdom and benevolence! how directly do they speak of an infinite source of mental fulness and strength! That high power of reflective investigation which has constructed the vast and ever-expanding edifice of human science, and searches with so penetrating an insight and so 223powerful a range the heavens and the earth, to make them tributary to its purpose; and that still more marvellous capacity, a delegated creator within its sphere, which has wrought such exquisite combinations of poetry and of art, accumulating treasures of wisdom and of beauty to our race—surely these bespeak a Master Mind, whose image they are, and whose beneficent glory they reflect.