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to the Academy. He also made some remarks on the diffi- 
culty of this method, by reason of the complexity of the men- 
tal operations, and the impossibility of otherwise attesting the 
results than by the exposition of the inquirer’s own thoughts, 
and the appeal to the consciousness of others. 
The Author then went on to explain the elementary law of 
simple apprehension, and shewed that however numerous or 
varied might be the objects presented in any single instant to 
the apprehension, the result must be one single idea—being a 
whole in itself, and of which all the components must be 
apprehended strictly as parts. From this fact he observed 
that the entire process of memory could be deduced. For 
this purpose he stated a case framed with a view to explain the 
ordinary process by which incidents and circumstances are re- 
called, by means of their association as parts or as wholes; so 
that either the part might recal the whole, or the whole the 
part. 
The Author then explained how this operation might be 
accidental, or the effect of design. The first would be the case 
of mere passive remembrance ; the other the active recollection 
of the will. The first would mostly be the result of the actual 
presence of some portion of the combined ideas; the other 
must be arrived at by an effort in which the mind succeeds in 
placing itself in some position of relation to the required idea, 
so as to fulfil the condition of the theory. ‘To meet the only 
difficulty which might be suggested by this exposition, the 
Author pointed out, that the occasion which might require 
such an effort must necessarily present a first link in a chain 
of associations, from which every subsequent step would be a 
result similarly occurring in its order, so far as the operation 
might happen to be rightly directed, and the materials within 
the compass of the mind engaged in it. 
The Author observed that the various causes of memory 
described by philosophers, are merely the circumstances at- 
tending the process here described. He observed that every 
