296 STUDIES IN LIFE AND SENSE. 



arise wholly or in greater part from impressions, which, being 

 derived directly or indirectly from the objects and material world 

 around us, we may term objective sensation?. They consist of the 

 mental photographs of the outer world, of ourselves, and of our own 

 relations to the world, which have been projected inwards so to 

 speak, and there fixed, to be printed off, as occasion requires, for 

 future use. The effort to recall reminiscences of past life and the 

 ineffective search after memories may be readily enough likened to 

 pursue the same simile to the attempts of the mental photog'rapher 

 to find amidst his many negatives the particular one required by the 

 exigency of the moment. Now and then we give up the quest in 

 despair ; but just as frequently, at a time when the necessity for the 

 remembrance of the event has passed by, there dawns upon us the 

 missing recollection the reproduction, by some sudden and inex- 

 plicable trait of mind-photography, of the mental positive, printed off 

 from its stored-up and long-hidden facsimile. I should maintain, 

 indeed, as a plausible enough theory of the memory-faculty and its 

 action, that no mental concept is ever lost entirely. Crowded out of 

 mind by the thoughts of later years, impressions of youth may never- 

 theless be suddenly resuscitated by a chance word or a passing 

 glance. And often unconsciously to ourselves, and in ways defying 

 logical conception, we may thus build veritable " haunted houses," 

 wherein the phantoms that rise and walk and converse are not of 

 flesh and blood, but represent the figures, ways, and even speech of 

 those whose life is buried in the past, and whose time was that of the 

 long ago. 



That, however, this memory-power of projecting from within out- 

 wards, upon the intelligence, impressions, and sensations either of 

 real nature, or blurred and indistinct from causes beyond our ken 

 possesses a further significance than merely that attaching to a feasible 

 speculation in physiology, may readily enough be made plain. We 

 sit down in some quiet nook on a still day, when hardly a sound 

 may be heard, and when the voices of the outer world appear to be 

 well-nigh hushed to silence ; and, favoured by outward conditions, 

 we fall into a reverie. Abstracted from that outer world, image after 

 image is projected from within outwards upon our intelligence, which 

 occasionally may actually fancy it sees vividly the objects it displays, or 

 that it hears the sounds which old memories so clearly bring before 

 it. A tune hummed softly awakens a thousand memories ; the 

 singer of olden days comes before us in all the reality of existence ; 

 the surroundings are reproduced with faithful exactitude ; the most 

 trifling detail comes boldly into the foreground of thought ; a ribbon, 

 a bracelet, the pattern of a carpet, the hue of a dress these and a 

 thousand other details are pictured out with truest fidelity ; and the 

 story is acted before our eyes so faithfully, that it is with a start of 



