108 HUME IV 



the bodily presentments of spiritual phenomena to 

 be, in the limbo of the brain. In that form of desire 

 which is called " attention/' the train of thought, 

 held fast, for a time, in the desired direction, seems 

 ever striving to get on to another line and the 

 junctions and sidings are so multitudinous ! 



The constitutents of trains of ideas may be 

 grouped in various ways. 

 Hume says : 



" We find, by experience, that when any impression has been 

 present in the mind, it again makes its appearance there as an 

 idea, and this it may do in two different ways : either when, on 

 its new appearance, it retains a considerable degree of its first 

 vivacity, and is somewhat intermediate between an impression 

 and an idea ; or when it entirely loses that vivacity, and is a 

 perfect idea. The faculty by which we repeat our impressions 

 in the first manner, is called the memory, and the other the 

 imagination." (I. pp. 23, 24.) 



And he considers that the only difference between 

 ideas of imagination and those of memory, except 

 the superior vivacity of the latter, lies in the fact 

 that those of memory preserve the original order 

 of the impressions from which they are derived, 

 while the imagination "is free to transpose and 

 change its ideas." 



The latter statement of the difference between 

 memory and imagination is less open to cavil than 

 the former, though by no means unassailable. 



The special characteristic of a memory surely is 

 not its vividness ; but that it is a complex idea, in 



