vision of a square pond, but I can see your thought, and you expect me to
see an oblong pond,' or, 'The symbol you are imagining has made me see a
woman holding a crystal, but it was a moonlight sea I should have seen.' I
discovered that the symbol hardly ever failed to call up its typical
scene, its typical event, its typical person, but that I could practically
never call up, no matter how vividly I imagined it, the particular scene,
the particular event, the particular person I had in my own mind, and that
when I could, the two visions rose side by side.

I cannot now think symbols less than the greatest of all powers whether
they are used consciously by the masters of magic, or half unconsciously
by their successors, the poet, the musician and the artist. At first I
tried to distinguish between symbols and symbols, between what I called
inherent symbols and arbitrary symbols, but the distinction has come to
mean little or nothing. Whether their power has arisen out of themselves,
or whether it has an arbitrary origin, matters little, for they act, as I
believe, because the great memory associates them with certain events and
moods and persons. Whatever the passions of man have gathered about,
becomes a symbol in the great memory, and in the hands of him who has the
secret, it is a worker of wonders, a caller-up of angels or of devils. The
symbols are of all kinds, for everything in heaven or earth has its
association, momentous or trivial, in the great memory, and one never
knows what forgotten events may have plunged it, like the toadstool and
the ragweed, into the great passions. Knowledgeable men and women in
Ireland sometimes distinguish between the simples that work cures by some
medical property in the herb, and those that do their work by magic. Such
magical simples as the husk of the flax, water out of the fork of an
elm-tree, do their work, as I think, by awaking in the depths of the mind
where it mingles with the great mind, and is enlarged by the great memory,
some curative energy, some hypnotic command. They are not what we call
faith cures, for they have been much used and successfully, the traditions
of all lands affirm, over children and over animals, and to me they seem
the only medicine that could have been committed safely to ancient hands.
To pluck the wrong leaf would have been to go uncured, but, if one had
eaten it, one might have been poisoned.

VIII

I have now described that belief in m