Rey. JAmMEs WILLs on accidental Association. 103 
tempted, arise from the indistinctness and complication of our thoughts, and from 
our entire unconsciousness of the slow courses of habit. This is, indeed, a topic 
which demands separate consideration. It has been involved in the most strange 
misconception by some of the ablest writers, of whom I shall only now say, that 
they have too much disregarded the distinction between the succession of distinct 
ideas and the habitual processes of the mind. A difficulty must arise from the cir- 
cumstance, that to think effectually the attention must be directed to the idea, and 
not to the operation. It is nearly impossible to seize and fix, for the purpose of 
analysis, the drifting currents of nearly evanescent thought, from which, in the 
most heedless moment, ideas seem to start spontaneously, because their origin 
is not traced, while we seem to think by chance, because we are not fully sensi- 
ble of the law which governs the lightest movement of the mind. Methods of 
judging and of thinking far beyond the reach of mere reason to discover, the 
creation of habitual processes, become intuitive as they are formed; and though 
children can command them, philosophy has failed in the effort to explain them. 
Hence the infelicitous oversight, into which modern writers have fallen, of ex- 
plaining these intuitions by referring them to unconscious arguments. 
One remarkable result of this theory is the distinctness with which it brings 
into evidence the simple elementary process of thought called memory. It seems 
to divest it of the character of a faculty or original elementary power, and to 
refer it to the law of consciousness and the external constitution of things. When, 
however, we carefully analyze the process, as described and traced in this Essay, 
the elementary law appears to consist in the intuitive tendency to revert to the 
whole original apprehension, from the recurrence of any component part. This ten- 
dency, then, is memory. Buta little careful consideration of the operations of the 
mind would shew, that the process called memory is but one mode of the operation 
of this tendency, in which the idea of the pasé is in some way included. The 
idea of a scene of yesterday differs from one of to-day, inasmuch as it was present 
at a particular hour, marked by its place in the chain of thought. The idea of a 
scene to come is, so far as our knowledge permits, conceived in all the wholeness 
of the present or the past. It, however, wants the main characters of actual reality 
and of self-consciousness which are the real distinctions. The times and locali- 
ties of the past are fixed by variously crossing lines of reality, which, hke circles 
of latitude and longitude, fix the point of past existence. These points are pro- 
minently marked by the strong and impressive component of the sense of personal 
