34 BEING AND FACULTIES OF MAN. 



and senses, and of stimulating and controlling their action 

 than the Consciousness and (or ?) Attention. But it must 

 be obvious that the word attention is not commonly used 

 with the full and comprehensive meaning which these 

 facts ascribe to it, and indeed show to be inherent in it ; t 

 and that though the word Consciousness is, after all, 

 nothing more than attention, and attention nothing less 

 than Consciousness, when intrinsic analysis and definition 

 are attempted, the expression Consciousness, in common 

 and conventional acceptation, carries more of the meaning 

 we seek to convey than the word Attention would do. 



The power of memory is perhaps one of the most 

 difficult mental qualities under the control of our Con- 

 sciousness for the metaphysician to comprehend. Memory 

 may be said to be the store of all our education and ex- 

 perience, but how or where is it preserved, and in what 

 manner does it write down the records of life, so that the 

 garrulous octogenarian, dead to the present, and incapable 

 of identifying the most familiar features of friendship 

 and kindred around him, wanders back with a vivid 

 delight to the long-departed and forgotten regions of the 

 past, and blends in his narrative old age the reality of 

 his second childhood with the phantoms of the first? 

 Does the Consciousness treasure recollections by some 

 abstract metaphysical power, which at last so peoples it 

 with visions that the view of reality is excluded by tho 

 thickly-crowded strata of memory's spectral years ? Or 

 does some dusty volume of the physical cerebrum, long 

 crowded over and hidden beneath the cares of life, reopen 

 its parchment pages when the over-tension has been at 

 length snapt, and the superincumbent pressure removed ? 

 And if so, in what hieroglyphic caligraphy are its pages 

 penned, that they are thus enabled so intensely to flit in mimic 

 life before us ? It is a strange region of Natural Magic, 

 that wild jumble of the living and the dead ; and yet it is 



