no MEMORY, HABIT, AND IMITATION 



discoveries are made by accident. But it is 

 doubtful whether these accidents have occurred 

 to men who were not prepared to welcome them. 

 It may be objected again, that undue stress has 

 been laid upon the power of the will in the 

 assembling of the materials with which imagina- 

 tion fashions its designs. Every writer is well 

 aware of the assistance which he owes to sub- 

 conscious thought : ideas and sentences suddenly 

 present themselves to him, as the spontaneous 

 offerings of his brain, that are astonishingly 

 superior to those which he has been able to con- 

 jure up by the concentration of his will. Not a 

 few may confess to ideas that have come to them 

 during sleep, and did not vanish before they could 

 be recorded. It is said, indeed, that Coleridge 

 awoke one morning with Christabel ready com- 

 posed in his brain. But the theme to which these 

 suggestions contribute has previously been en- 

 shrined as the altar-piece of a mental disposition : 

 the memory has been reasserting its treasures 

 subconsciously, but under an impulse which it 

 received from conscious volition. Imagination 

 may, then, be denned as the assembling of memories 

 which have been reasserted by emotion under the 

 influence of the will. 



The effect of a mental disposition, or " field of 

 volition," is familiar to many of us in the process 

 by which we call to mind a name that has escaped 

 us. We try to recollect it, but in vain ; we cease 

 to strive after it, when it suddenly presents 

 itself. Influenced by our desire, the memory- 

 stream has subconsciously delivered up the 

 symbol which would not obey the summons of 

 conscious effort. 



By imagination we can repeat emotional ex- 

 periences of the past. Direct recollections of them 

 may be but pale, sentimental, reflections of the 



