recollection, to eke out the retentiveness of the new strain. The more one's acquisitions advance, the greater the scope for this work of fitting old cloth into new garments; but previous acquisition is of avail, only according as the stroke of resuscitation is good, and is able to pierce the disguises of diversity and altered form attaching to past examples.

50. The retentive power of the mind is not thoroughly tested, except by entire and absolute novelty, a thing that is more and more rare as one grows older. In learning languages, for example, we have less to acquire with every new individual language. Latin prepares for French, Italian, Spanish, &c.; German for Dutch; Sanscrit for Hindostanee. The generalizations of philologists in tracing common roots through all the Indo-European tongues, greatly diminish the number of original ties that contiguity has to fix. All discoveries of generalization have this effect; and if an individual learner can see likenesses, in addition to what have been already promulgated, his labour is shortened by strokes of power peculiar to himself.

51. The Historical Memory might furnish good examples of the intervention of Similarity, in making up the coherent tissue of recollected events. In the transactions of the world, great and small, there is so much of repetition, that a new history is in reality a various reading of some old one; not to mention how much each nation repeats itself through its successive epochs. To a dull mind, a large amount of this repetition is lost for all purposes, the aid to memory among the rest; but a keen-sighted attraction for every vestige of recurring likeness enables one to retain large masses of narrative, at a small expense of adhesive acquisition. Campaign suggests campaign, and one battle another; an intrigue, a negotiation, a career of ambition, a conquest, a revolution, are things familiar to the student gone some way in history; only certain minor features, some of the proportions and circumstantials, are special to the case in hand, and require to be fixed in the memory by pure contiguity. No man could recite a narrative of any sort from a single reading or hearing, if it

THE HISTORICAL MEMORY AIDED.

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were all new to him; to tell a story, an hour after hearing it, would be impossible, but for our already possessing, among our stored recollections, more than nine-tenths of all the adhesions that enter into it.

1.

CHAPTER III.

COMPOUND ASSOCIATION

HITHERTO we have restricted our attention to single

threads or indivisible links of association, whether of Contiguity or Similarity. It remains for us to consider the case where several threads, or a Plurality of links or bonds of connexion, unite in reviving some previous thought or mental state. No new principle is introduced here; we have merely to note, what seems an almost unavoidable effect of the combined action, that the re-instatement is thereby made more easy and certain. Associations that are individually too weak, to operate the revival of a past idea, may succeed by acting together; and there is thus opened up to our view a means of aiding our recollection, or invention, when the one thread in hand is too feeble to effect a desired recall. It happens, in fact, that, in a very large number of our mental transitions, there is present a multiple bond of association.

The combinations may be made up of Contiguities alone, of Similarities alone, or of Contiguity and Similarity mixed. Moreover, we shall find that in Emotion and in Volition there are influences either assisting or obstructing the proper intellectual forces. In the reviving of a past image or idea, it is never unimportant, that the revival gratifies a favourite emotion, or is strongly willed in the pursuit of an end. We must endeavour to appreciate, as far as we are able, the influence of these extra-intellectual energies within the sphere of intellect; but, as they would rarely suffice for the reproduction of thought, if acting apart and alone, we are led to look at them chiefly as modifying the effects of the strictly intellectual forces, or as combining elements in the composition of associations.

CONJUNCTIONS COMBINED.

The general law may be stated as follows:

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Past actions, sensations, thoughts, or emotions, are recalled more easily, when associated either through contiguity or through similarity, with more than one present object or impression.

COMPOSITION OF CONTIGUITIES.

2. We begin with the composition of contiguities. Instances might be cited under all the heads of the first chapter; but a less profuse selection will suffice. There will, however, be a gain in clearness by taking Conjunctions and Successions separately.

Conjunctions. For a simple example of a compound conjunction, we may suppose a person smelling a liquid and identifying the smell as something felt before, but unable to recall to mind the material causing it. Here the bond between an odour and the odorous substance is too feeble for reproducing the idea or the name of the substance. Suppose farther that the person could taste the liquid without feeling the odour, and that in the taste he could recognize a former taste, but could not remember the thing. If, in these circumstances, the concurrence of the two present sensations of taste and smell brought the substance to the recollection, we should have a true instance of composite association. If one of the two links is fully equal to the restoring effect, there is no case under the present law; in order to constitute a proper example, each should be insufficient when acting singly. Although there can be no doubt as to the fact of such revivals, we might easily suppose it otherwise. Combination is not strength under all circumstances. A gallon of water at 40°, cannot yield a spoonful at 41°. Ten thousand commonplace intellects would not make one genius, under any system of co-operation. The multiplication of unaided eyes could never equal the vision of one person with a telescope, or a microscope.

We have seen that the complex wholes around us in the

world, are held together in the recollection by the adhesive force of Contiguity; such objects as a tree, a human figure, a scene in nature, cannot continue in the mind, or be revived as ideas, until frequent repetition has made all the parts coherent. After the requisite iteration, a complex object, such as a rural village, may be revived by the presence of a single portion of it, as some street, or building, or marked locality. But, if the village is one not very well known, that is, if the notion of it is not very firmly aggregated in the mind, the traveller just entering may be not ready to identify it by the first thing that strikes him; he may require to go on till several other objects come in view, when probably their joint impression will be able to bring up the whole, in other words, will remind him what village he is now entering.

So in regarding objects as concretes, or combinations of many distinct qualities,—an orange, for example, which affects all the senses, a fixing process makes the different sensations hold together in one complex idea. Here, too, there is room for the joint action of associating links in recalling an image to the mind. I have already imagined a case of this description, where the united action of smell and of taste was supposed to revive the idea of the concrete object causing them, either being of itself insufficient for the purpose.

3. It is, however, when we go beyond the case of isolated objects, to the still greater aggregates made up by the relations of things to one another, that we can reap examples of multiple association in the greatest abundance. In the connexions of objects with places, with persons, with uses, and with properties, we see numberless occasions for the working of the composite link.

When things have a fixed locality, they become associated in the mind with that locality, or with a number of companion objects or appearances. This is one of the means of their restoration to the mind in idea. The sight or remembrance of a harbour recalls the shipping; the recollection of a building brings up its known contents. Conversely, an