by laying down the book which we are reading and
recapitulating what we can remember of it. But many times more powerful
than recollection is recognition, perhaps because it is more assisted by
association. We have known and forgotten, and after a long interval the
thing which we have seen once is seen again by us, but with a different
feeling, and comes back to us, not as new knowledge, but as a thing to
which we ourselves impart a notion already present to us; in Plato's
words, we set the stamp upon the wax. Every one is aware of the
difference between the first and second sight of a place, between a
scene clothed with associations or bare and divested of them. We say to
ourselves on revisiting a spot after a long interval: How many things
have happened since I last saw this! There is probably no impression
ever received by us of which we can venture to say that the vestiges are
altogether lost, or that we might not, under some circumstances, recover
it. A long-forgotten knowledge may be easily renewed and therefore is
very different from ignorance. Of the language learnt in childhood not
a word may be remembered, and yet, when a new beginning is made, the
old habit soon returns, the neglected organs come back into use, and the
river of speech finds out the dried-up channel.

e. 'Consciousness' is the most treacherous word which is employed in
the study of the mind, for it is used in many senses, and has rarely,
if ever, been minutely analyzed. Like memory, it accompanies all mental
operations, but not always continuously, and it exists in various
degrees. It may be imperceptible or hardly perceptible: it may be the
living sense that our thoughts, actions, sufferings, are our own. It
is a kind of attention which we pay to ourselves, and is intermittent
rather than continuous. Its sphere has been exaggerated. It is sometimes
said to assure us of our freedom; but this is an illusion: as there
may be a real freedom without consciousness of it, so there may be a
consciousness of freedom without the reality. It may be regarded as a
higher degree of knowledge when we not only know but know that we know.
Consciousness is opposed to habit, inattention, sleep, death. It may be
illustrated by its derivative conscience, which speaks to men, not only
of right and wrong in the abstract, but of right and wrong actions in
reference to themselves and their circumstances.

f. Association is another of the ever-present phenomena of the