ection may be compared to the sight of an
object at a great distance which we have previously seen near and seek
to bring near to us in thought. Memory is to sense as dreaming is to
waking; and like dreaming has a wayward and uncertain power of recalling
impressions from the past.

Thus begins the passage from the outward to the inward sense. But as
yet there is no conception of a universal--the mind only remembers
the individual object or objects, and is always attaching to them some
colour or association of sense. The power of recollection seems to
depend on the intensity or largeness of the perception, or on the
strength of some emotion with which it is inseparably connected. This is
the natural memory which is allied to sense, such as children appear to
have and barbarians and animals. It is necessarily limited in range, and
its limitation is its strength. In later life, when the mind has become
crowded with names, acts, feelings, images innumerable, we acquire
by education another memory of system and arrangement which is both
stronger and weaker than the first--weaker in the recollection
of sensible impressions as they are represented to us by eye or
ear--stronger by the natural connexion of ideas with objects or with one
another. And many of the notions which form a part of the train of our
thoughts are hardly realized by us at the time, but, like numbers or
algebraical symbols, are used as signs only, thus lightening the labour
of recollection.

And now we may suppose that numerous images present themselves to the
mind, which begins to act upon them and to arrange them in various
ways. Besides the impression of external objects present with us or just
absent from us, we have a dimmer conception of other objects which have
disappeared from our immediate recollection and yet continue to exist in
us. The mind is full of fancies which are passing to and fro before it.
Some feeling or association calls them up, and they are uttered by the
lips. This is the first rudimentary imagination, which may be truly
described in the language of Hobbes, as 'decaying sense,' an expression
which may be applied with equal truth to memory as well. For memory and
imagination, though we sometimes oppose them, are nearly allied; the
difference between them seems chiefly to lie in the activity of the one
compared with the passivity of the other. The sense decaying in memory
receives a flash of light or life from imagination. Dreaming i