with a general law, though exceptions so important, and so innumerable, might themselves have served for a proof that the general law was inaccu rate. After these remarks, then, I trust that you will not merely have seen the reasons which led me to prefer to the use of the ambiguous phrase association, the substitution of the simpler term suggestion, but that you will be disposed also to admit the justness of that distinction, on which the substitution was founded. The importance of the distinction, however, you will perceive more fully, in the applications that are afterwards to be made of it, in reducing under simple suggestion, phenomena ascribed by philosophers to many different intellectual powers. To this I shall proceed in my next Lecture. LECTURE XLI. REDUCTION OF CERTAIN SUPPOSED FACULTIES TO SIMPLE SUGGESTION,-I. CONCEPTION,-II. MEMORY. GENTLEMEN, my last Lecture was employed in considering the nature of that tendency of the mind, by which it exists successively in the states which constitute the variety of our conceptions, in our trains of thought; my object being to ascertain whether this tendency depend on any previous intellectual process, constituting what has been termed a union or association of ideas, or, simply on the relations of the conceptions themselves, at the moment of suggestion, without any previous union or association whatever of the idea or other feeling which suggests, with the idea or other feeling which is suggested. I explained to you the reasons which seem to lead us, in every case, in which conception follows conception, in trains that have a sort of wild regularity, to look back to the past, for some mysterious associations of our ideas, by which this regular confusion of their successions may be explained; though, in the phenomena themselves, there is no evidence of any such association, or earlier connecting process of any kind, all of which we are conscious being merely the original perception and the subsequent suggestion. It is, in a great measure, I remarked, in consequence of obscure notions, entertained with respect to this supposed ASSOCIATION of ideas, as something prior and necessary to the actual operation of the simple principle of spontaneous suggestion, that the phenomena of this simple principle of the mind have been referred to various intellectual powers, from the impossibility of finding, in many cases, any source of prior association, and the consequent necessity of inventing some new power for the production of phenomena, which seemed not to be reducible to suggestion, or to differ from its common forms, merely because we had encumbered the simple process of suggestion, with unnecessary and false conditions. My next object, then, will be to show how truly that variety of powers, thus unnecessarily, and therefore, unphilosophically devised, are reducible to the principle of simple suggestion; or, at least, to this simple principle, in combination with some of those other principles, which I pointed out, as VOL. I. 52 parts of our mental constitution, in my arrangement of the phenomena of the mind. It will be of advantage, however, previously to take a slight retrospect of the principal points, which may be considered as established, with respect to simple suggestion; that we may see more clearly what it is, from which the other supposed powers are said to be different. In the first place, we can have no doubt of the general fact of suggestion, that conception follows conception, in our trains of thought, without any recurrence of the external objects, which as perceived, originally gave occasion to them. As little can we doubt that these conceptions, as internal states of the mind, independent of any immediate influence of external things, do not follow each other loosely, but according to a certain general relation, or number of relations, which constitute what I have termed the primary laws of suggestion, and which exercise their influence variously, in different persons, and at different times, according to circumstances, which, as modifying the former, I have denominated secondary laws of suggestion. In the third place, we have seen, that they do not follow each other merely, the suggesting idea giving immediate place to the suggested; but that various conceptions, which arise at different moments, may co-exist, and form one compound feeling, in the same manner as various perceptions, that arise together, or at different moments may co-exist, and form one compound feeling of another species,-all that complexity of forms and colours, for example, which gives a whole world of wonders at once to our vision, or those choral sounds which flow mingled from innumerable vibrations that exist together, without confusion, in the small aperture of the ear, and in a single moment fill the soul with a thousand harmonies, as if, in the perception of so many co-existing sounds, it had a separate sense for every separate voice, and could exist with a strange diffusive consciousness, in a simultaneous variety of states. Lastly, we have seen that no previous association, or former connecting process, of any kind, is necessary for suggestion,-that we have no consciousness of any intermediate process between the primary perception and the subsequent suggestion, and that we are not merely without the slightest consciousness of a process, which is thus gratuitously supposed, but that there are innumerable phenomena which it is not very easy to reconcile with the supposition, on any view of it, and which certainly, at least, cannot be reconciled with it, on that view of the primary laws of suggestion, which the assertors of a distinct specific Faculty of Association have been accustomed to take. Let us now, then, apply the knowledge which we have thus acquired, and proceed to consider some of those forms of suggestion, which have been ranked as distinct intellectual powers. That which its greater simplicity leads me to consider first, is what has been termed by philosophers the Power of Conception, which has been defined, the power that enables us to form a notion of an absent object of perception, or of some previous feeling of the mind. The definition of the supposed power is sufficiently intelligible; but is there reason to add the power thus defined, to our other mental functions, as a distinct and peculiar faculty? That we have a certain mental power, or susceptibility, by which, in accordance with this definition, the perception of one object may excite the notion of some absent object, is unquestionably true. But this is the very function which is meant by the power of suggestion itself, when stripped of the illusion as to prior association; and if the conception be separated from the suggestion, nothing will remain to constitute the power of suggestion, which is only another name for the same power. I enter, for example, an apartment in my friend's house during his long absence from home; I see his flute, or the work of some favourite author, lying on his table. The mere sight of either of these, awakes instantly my conception of my friend, though at the moment, he might have been absent from my thought. I see him again present. If I look at the volume, I almost think that I hear him arguing strenuously for the merits of his favourite, as in those evenings of social contention, when we have brought poets and philosophers to war against poets and philosophers. If I look at the flute, I feel instantly a similar illusion. I hear him again animating it with his very touch,-breathing into it what might almost, without a metaphor, be said to be the breath of life,-and giving it not utterance merely, but eloquence. In these cases of simple suggestion, it is said the successive mental states which constitute the notions of my friend himself, of the arguments which I again seem to hear and combat, of the melodies that silently enchant me,-are conceptions indicating, therefore, a power of the mind from which they arise, that in reference to the effects produced by it, may be called the power of conception. But, if they arise from a peculiar power of conception,-and if there be a power of association or suggestion, which is also concerned, how are these powers to be distinguished, and what part of the process is it which we owe to this latter power? If there were no suggestion of my friend, it is very evident that there could be no conception of my friend; and if there were no conception of him, it would be absurd to speak of a suggestion, in which nothing was suggested. Whether we use the term suggestion, or association, in this case, is of no consequence. Nothing more can be accurately meant by either term, in reference to the example which I have used, than the tendency of my mind, after existing in the state which constitutes the perception of the flute or volume, and of the room in which I observe it, to exist immediately afterwards in that different state which constitutes the conception of my friend. The laws of suggestion or association are merely the general circumstances, according to which conceptions, or certain other feelings, arise. There is not, in any case of suggestion, both a suggestion and a conception, more than there is in any case of vision, both a vision and a sight. What one glance is to the capacity of vision, one conception is to the capacity of suggestion. We may see innumerable objects in succession; we may conceive innumerable objects in succession. But we see them, because we are susceptible of vision: we conceive them, because we have that susceptibility of spontaneous suggestion, by which conceptions arise after each other in regular trains. This duplication of a single power, to account for the production of a single state of mind, appears to me a very striking example of the influence of that misconception, with respect to association, which I occupied so much of your time in attempting to dissipate. If association and suggestion had been considered as exactly synonymous, implying merely the succession of one state of mind to another state of mind,-without any mysterious process of union of the two feelings prior to the suggestion, the attention of inquirers would, in this just and simple view, have been fixed on the single moment of the suggestion itself:-and I cannot think that any philosopher would, in this case, have contended for two powers, as operating together at the very same moment, in the production of the very same conception; but that one capacity would have been regarded as sufficient for this one simple effect, whether it were termed, with more immediate reference to the secondary feeling that is the effect, the power of conception, or with more immediate reference to the primary feeling which precedes it as its cause, the power of suggestion or association. It is very different, however, when the conception, the one simple effect produced, is made to depend, not merely on the tendency of the mind to exist in that state, at the particular moment at which the conception arises, but on some process of association, which may have operated at a considerable interval before; for in that case the process of association, which is supposed to have taken place at one period, must itself imply one power or function of the mind, and the actual suggestion, or rise of the conception, at an interval afterwards, some different power or function. - With respect to the supposed intellectual power of conception, then, as distinct from the intellectual power of association or suggestion, we may very safely conclude, that the belief of this is founded merely on a mistake as to the nature of association;-that the power of suggestion and the power of conception are the same, both being only that particular susceptibility of the mind, from which, in certain circumstances, conceptions arise,—or at least, that if the power of conception differs from the more general power of suggestion, it differs from it only as a part differs from the whole, as the power of taking a single step differs from the power of traversing a whole field,— the power of drawing a single breath from the general power of respiration,the moral susceptibility by which we are capable of forming one charitable purpose from that almost divine universality of benevolence, in a whole virtuous life, to which every moment is either some exertion for good, or some wish for good which comprehends within its sphere of ACTION,-that has no limits but physical impossibility,-every being whom it can instruct or amend, or relieve or gladden; and, in its sphere of generous DESIRE, all that is beyond the limits of its power of benefiting. The next supposed intellectual power to which I would call your attention, is the power of memory. In treating of our suggestions, and consequently, as you have seen, of our conceptions, which are only parts of the suggested series, I have, at the same time, treated of our remembrances, or, at least, of the more important part of our remembrances, because our remembrances are nothing more than conceptions united with the notion of a certain relation of time. They are conceptions of the past, felt as conceptions of the past,-that is to say, felt as having a certain relation of antecedence to our present feeling. The remembrance is not a simple but a complex state of mind; and all which is necessary to reduce a remembrance to a mere conception, is to separate from it a part of the complexity,-that part of it which constitutes the notion of a certain relation of antecedence. We are conscious of our present feeling, whatever it may be; for this is, in truth, only another name for our consciousness itself. The moment of present time, at which we are thus conscious, is a bright point,—ever moving, and yet, as it were, ever fixed,— which divides the darkness of the future from the twilight of the past. It is, in short, what Cowley terms the whole of human life, The present moment, then, though ever fleeting, is to us, as it were, a fixed point; and it is a point which guides us in the most important of our measurements, in our retrospects of the past, and our hopes of the future. The particular feeling of any moment before the present, as it rises again in our mind, would be a simple conception, if we did not think of it, either immediately or indirectly, in relation to some other feeling earlier or later. It becomes a remembrance when we combine with it this feeling of relation, the relation which constitutes our notion of time;-for time, as far as we are capable of understanding it, or rather of feeling it, is nothing more than the varieties of this felt relation, which, in reference to one of the subjects of the relation, we distinguish by the word before,-in reference to the other, by the word after. It is a relation, I may remark, which we feel nearly in the same manner as we feel the relation which bodies bear to each other, as co-existing in space. We say of a house, that it is two miles from a particular village, half a mile from the river, a mile from the bridge, with a feeling of relation very similar to that with which we say of one event, that it occurred a month ago, of another event, that it occurred in the memorable year of our first going to school, of another, that it happened in our infancy. There is some point to which, in estimating distance of space, we refer the objects which we measure, as there is a point of time in the present moment, or in some event which we have before learned to consider thus relatively, to which, directly or indirectly, we refer the events of which we speak as past or future, or more or less recent. If we had been incapable of considering more than two events together, we probably never should have invented the word time, but should have contented ourselves with simpler words, expressive of the simple relation of the two. But we are capable of considering a variety of events, all of which are felt by us to bear to that state of mind which constitutes our present consciousness, some relation of priority or subsequence,-which they seem to us to bear also reciprocally to each other; and the varieties of this relation oblige us to invent a general term for expressing them all. This general word, invented by us for expressing all the varieties of priority and subsequence, is time,—a word, therefore, which expresses no actual reality, but only relations that are felt by us, in the objects of our conception. To think of time is not to think of any thing existing of itself, for time is not a thing but a relation; it is only to have some conceptions of objects, which we regard as prior and subsequent; and without the conception of objects of some kind, as subjects of the relation of priority and subsequence, it is as little possible for us to imagine any time, as to imagine brightness or dimness without a single ray of light,-proportional magnitude, without any dimensions, or any other relation without any other subject. When the notion of time, then, is combined with any of our conceptions, as in memory, all which is combined with the simple conception * Cowley's Ode on Life and Fame, Stanza I. ver. 10, 11, slightly altered. Up betwixt two eternities."-Orig. |