FACULTIES OF THE MIND. 



of fiction, we never expect to see realized ; while some 

 others, which we know never existed, are yet confidently 

 anticipated. 



It is by means of imagination thus exercised, that we 

 arrange our plans of conduct, or invent new schemes, for 

 the employment of our time. It is the greatest source of 

 our activity, and is the only intellectual faculty which ac- 

 celerates our exertions to improve. 



The justly celebrated Mr STEWART considers it as suffi- 

 ciently evident, " that imagination is not a simple power of 

 the mind, like attention, conception, or abstraction, but that 

 it is formed by a combination of various faculties *." Of 

 these simple powers which he has enumerated, we have 

 already considered Conception as identical with Memory, 

 and Abstraction with Attention ; but it remains to be 

 pointed out what those faculties are, which, when com- 

 bined, produce imagination. Attention is exclusively oc- 

 cupied with present impressions or ideas, and memory 

 with those which have been. Now, although the ima- 

 gination makes use of the materials furnished by the me- 

 mory, and employs attention while acting upon them, 

 yet it forms from these ideas which never have existed, 

 and never will exist ; or it forms such pictures as by 

 exertion may be realized, and bends all the faculties of 

 the mind to their production. Were the efforts of the 

 imagination thus confined to what had taken place, there 

 might be room for considering it as a combination of atten- 

 tion and memory ; but when it looks into the future it ex- 

 hibits its peculiar and exclusive character. Indeed it is 

 this power of anticipating the future, much more than of 

 acting upon the recollections of the past, that gives to the 

 imagination its rank as a distinct power of the mind. 



Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Miml, vol. i, p. Iss. 



