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from not marking the degree in which vital phenomena are independent of mental action.

A fourth argument for unconscious modifications of mind, is found in the association of ideas. Links of association, it is said, are frequently omitted. The mind passes from number one to number five or eight in a train of connections without distinctly recalling the intervening steps. How does this happen? Does the mind move through the entire series, though too rapidly for memory? or does the unbroken thread lie below consciousness, there traversed by the mind? The last query is thought to indicate the true solution. But is there any sufficient reason for shutting us up to these alternatives? Is it so certain that the mind never makes a leap, that it cannot associate five with eight directly, omitting altogether six and seven? Is not this also an act and a method of association, as much so as that which originally united the ideas marked five, six, seven and eight, respectively? Six scholars stand before me in the recitation room. This fact of itself is a ground of association, but it also gives occasion for fresh associations of various kinds, and so may cause the memory on the presence of one to recall any of the remaining five by some new nexus.

Take the case of acquired meanings. A word may have stolen from application to application along an obscure path of subtile connections, till it has reached the twentieth meaning. How many of these successive uses any one mind shall recall in employing the word will depend in part on knowledge, and in part on the frequency with which the word recurs.

The last meaning may be the only one suggested to the majority of minds in the majority of cases, though the previous ones and their connections may be known to them, in whole or in part. The word becomes at length a