NewThoughtLibrary.com / DivineLibrary.org

accumulated stores of the mind are the condition of its expanded action, and this increased action gives new significance to its acquisitions. It is not easy to say how far present soundness and shrewdness of judgment are the product of increased strength, and how far of increased knowledge. Our reasoning powers, by easily evolving conclusions from premises, by renewing, rather than by recalling previous processes of thought, may closely resemble the memory in their action. We may seem to recollect an argument, to remember a proposition, when in fact we are merely tracing again the steps of reasoning of which it is constructed. Historical facts also, as our information is -enlarged, cluster together, and are held in the mind with less tension of memory than while they remained comparatively few and scattered. A knowledge of their dependencies enables us to reach one from another, to mingle reasoning with memory, and hold the entire group by the double ties of deduction and recollection.

Memory is the simple power of recalling the past in our intellectual experience. We have no occasion for the double division of a conservative and a reproductive power. We know nothing of any conservation save as we choose to infer it from reproduction. The first, without the last, can give no ground of inference even wherewith to establish its existence. Reproduction is the only process that comes under our observation. We do know that the mind recalls its previous states, but how this is done, or whence these states come, are inquiries either impossible of answer, or impertinent to the subject. Indeed, -the tendency to ask them, we regard as an unphilosophical one, pushing back of simple ultimate action, and this under the analogies of the material world. Of course those who enter on the wholly theoretical ground of the manner of the mind's possessing its phenomena may find occasion for a theoretical,