MENTAL OPERATIONS IN RELATION TO TIME. 101 



memory and association, through which these sequences 

 are especially manifested ? 



To answer this question we might well put aside 

 the word Will altogether, as one so variously and 

 vaguely used, both in philosophy and common life, 

 that it perplexes rather than clears the path of enquiry. 

 It is hard indeed to find any simple term wherewith to 

 express the potentiality of the mind over its own ope- 

 rations. Where even consciousness draws so shadowy 

 a line between what is voluntary and involuntary^- 

 where association of ideas expressed by their sequence 

 occurs so often independently of the will, or even 

 despite it and where the power of controlling this 

 sequence varies so much in different minds and at dif- 

 ferent times in the same mind, we must needs feel 

 that we are immersed in a metaphysical mist, which it 

 is difficult either to illumine or disperse. The faculty 

 of volition, if such we may term it, is so inextricably 

 blended with what is automatic in the acts of memory 

 and association, that we can draw no distinct line of 

 disseverment, nor even mark by consciousness when 

 volition is lost in successions of mind which it does not 

 control, or in bodily actions which habit has rendered 

 next to instinctive. 1 



Here again the method of enquiry, by succession in 

 time, seems to me to go farthest in explanation of the 



1 A curious illustration of the difficulty besetting these questions is 

 the doubt still propounded, whether we think in words. Several writers 

 (Schelling and Hegel among the Germans) hold that there must be 

 language in thought as a necessity of the mental act an opinion not 

 easy to reconcile with the fact that other animals think as well as man ; 

 but worth noticing in proof of the obscurity that clouds over the most 

 familiar functions of mental life. 



