MEXTAL OPERATIONS IX RELATION TO TIME. 107 



objects have been thus suddenly evoked and dismissed. 

 There is the volition to change ; but how must we 

 define that effort by which the mind, without any 

 principle of selection or association, can grasp so rapidly 

 a succession of images thus incongruous, drawn seem- 

 ingly at random from past thoughts and memories? 

 I call it an effort, because it is felt as such, and cannot 

 be long continued without fatigue. But it can hardly 

 be called an effort of will, since this seems to do nothing 

 more than make the mind a tabula rasa for the moment, 

 to receive the new objects so strangely I might almost 

 say, irrationally written upon it. The whole comes 

 within those mysterious inter-relations of mental life of 

 which we can only truly speak in confession of our 

 ignorance. 



Quitting this instance of what might be called a 

 play of the mind upon itself, I may notice other cases 

 illustrative, more or less, of that succession in time of 

 mental acts which, as a basis of enquiry, I am seeking 

 to suggest. I have already alluded to the great 

 diversities in that power, by which we give connexion 

 and order to the sequences of thought, constituting 

 what is called Reason. It is as curious as instructive 

 to study men's minds through their different syllogistic 

 capacities. Locke says : ' There are some men of one 

 syllogism, some of two syllogisms, and no more ; ' and 

 he might have denoted yet more forcibly those diver- 

 sities which render the processes and results of one 

 man's reasoning absolutely unintelligible to others. It 

 may further be observed how curiously the sequences 

 in some minds are dislocated, as it were, from all 



