FACULTIES OF THE MIND. 293 
of fiction, we never expect to see realized; while some 
others, which we know never existed, are yet confidently 
anticipated. 
It is by means of imagination thus exercised, that we 
‘ arrange our plans of conduct, or invent new schemes, for 
the employment of our time. It is the greatest source of 
our activity, and is the only intellectual faculty which ac- 
celerates our exertions to improve. 
The justly celebrated Mr Srewarr considers it as suffi- 
ciently evident, “ that imagination is not a simple power of 
the mind, like attention, conception, or abstraction, but that 
it is formed by a combination of various faculties*.” Of 
these simple powers which he has enumerated, we have 
already considered Conception as identical with Memory, 
and Abstraction with Attention; but it remains to be 
pointed out what those faculties are, which, when com- 
bined, produce imagination. Attention is exclusively oc- 
cupied with present impressions or ideas, and memory 
with those which have been. Now, although the ima- 
gination makes use of the materials furnished by the me~ 
mory, and employs attention while acting upon them, 
yet it forms from these ideas which never have existed, 
and never will exist; or it forms such pictures as by 
exertion may be reatized, and bends all the faculties of 
the mind to their production. Were the efforts of the 
imagination thus confined to what had taken place, there 
might be room for considering it as a combination of atten- 
tion and memory; but when it looks into the future it ex- 
hibits its peculiar and exclusive character. Indeed it is 
this power of anticipating the future, much more than of 
acting upon the recollections of the past, that gives to the 
imagination its rank as a distinct power of the mind. 

——_—~ 
* Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, vol. i. p. 488, 
