NATURAL AND HABITUAL CONJUNCTIONS-STILL LIFE

55. The things about us that maintain fixed places and relations become connected in idea as they are in reality, and the mind thus takes on a phantasmagoric representation of our habitual environment. The house we live in, with its furniture and fittings, the street, town, or rural scene that we encounter daily,-by their incessant iteration cohere into abiding recollections, and any one part easily brings all the rest into the view. These familiar haunts exemplify the highest degree of pictorial adhesion that we can ever attain to, being impressed by countless repetitions and strong natural interest. We likewise associate a number of human beings. with their abodes, dresses, avocations, and all other constant accompaniments.

Objects at a distance from our daily circle afford the best opportunity of trying the adhesiveness of the mind for extended pictures. A house we have visited only once or twice, a strange street, a new scene, will put to the test the visual persistence of the character. This case resolves itself partly into the case of coloured impressions, and partly into that of visual forms, the tenacity for colour being the essential point. A coloured decoration is quite irrecoverable if the sense of colour is not very powerful; the same may be said of a heterogeneous and formless collection of ornaments or curiosities. The recollection of dresses turns principally upon the hold we have of colour. The interior of a room implies form, and may be retained as such; but if the sense of colour is indifferent, it will be revived only in outline. A garden, a shrubbery, an array of fields, rely very much upon the coloured element. The more irregular the outlines of things are, the more do we depend upon our tenacity of coloured impressions to make them cohere.

For the easy retention of the variegated imagery of the world about us in all its richness, a powerful adhesiveness of colour is the first requisite. Whether this adhesiveness and persistence is a property of the eye and its nerve centres,

THE NATURALIST AND THE POET.

415 or of the cerebrum generally, I cannot say; but wherever it occurs it is a powerful determining circumstance of the character. It gives to the mind a pictorial character, an attraction for the concrete of nature, with all the interests that hang upon it. We have just seen that it is one of the qualifications of the naturalist; it is also the general basis of character in the painter and poet, for although both these have to select from the multitude of appearances such of them as have an interest in art, yet it is well that they should easily keep a hold of anything that presents itself to the eye, whether beautiful or not. A luxuriant imagination proceeds on the facility of retaining scenes of every description; nothing less could sustain the flow of our greatest poets. Although all objects are not beautiful or picturesque, yet there is hardly any appearance that may not come in well in some composition, and the poet-painter ought to be a person of strong disinterested retentiveness for everything that falls on his view. Any one stopping short at this point would be a naturalist simply; but when the poetic sense is added to lay a special stress upon the beautiful, grand, or touching objects, the naturalist passes into the artist. A strong artistic sense, without the broad disinterested hold of nature's concretes in general, may make a man a genuine or even an exquisite artist, but thin and meagre in his conceptions; great taste with feeble invention. Instances both of this and of the opposite coincidence-richness without delicacy-occur in all the fine arts.

It will thus appear that no great difference obtains between the last head and the present, as regards the faculty at work. The aggregate of impressions in a single mineral, or plant, is made coherent by the same force of growth that groups these individuals together into the totals that make up the face of nature. In the latter case we are more completely dependent on impressions of sight; in the others, tactual inspection often enters, but even in these, sight forms our principal hold and medium of discrimination. Between the apple that appeals to every sense and yields a complex notion made up of all, and the starry heavens that affect the eye

alone, there is less of intellectual difference than there seems, for even the apple is retained in the mind principally as an object of sight.

56. Among the greater aggregates implied under the present head I may include those artificial representations intended to aid the conception of the outer world, as, for example, maps, and diagrams, and pictorial sketches. A very great utility is served by these devices, and much intellectual power and practical skill depend on our being able to associate and retain them. The geography of the globe is summed up in an artificial globe or a set of maps, with outline, shade, and colour, to correspond with the differences of sea and land, mountain and plain. There are very great differences among individuals in the hold that they take of a map, with all the information it conveys. It appears to me that a good adhesiveness for colour is the important element in a case of this kind, just as in the recollection of the actual surface of a country. It is a case of that easy retentiveness of a great multitude of impressions, that contrasts with the severe hold of a few selected ones; an extensive rather than an intensive mind. Next to a map we may class natural history sketches, which contain a great variety of appearance depending mainly upon differences of colour. Anatomical diagrams and machinery are much of the same nature, but incline to the diagrams of abstract science, where attention has to be strongly concentrated on narrow points. When we come to the figures of Euclid, colour entirely disappears as an element; the pictorial retentiveness above descanted on is of no avail. Form is everything, and that form is not various but limited, and exceedingly important. This illustrates by contrast the power of seizing nature's aggregates and concretes, where thousands of distinct impressions must fall into their places and cohere with ease and in a short time. A crowded theatre and the forty-seventh of Euclid are equally objects to the eye, and also to the conceiving mind when they are gone; but the region of the brain that determines the adhesiveness must be quite different in the two cases; in the one, colour and variegated form, in the other, a few regular forms with absence of colour. The pos

OBJECTS, WITH THEIR SCIENTIFIC PROPERTIES.

417

session of this last class of objects is an example of the intensive adhesiveness required in the abstract sciences.

57. There is an interesting class of artificial conjunctions, wherein the obvious appearances of things are associated with other appearances brought out by manipulation and experiment. The properties of a mineral, the complete notion that we can attain respecting it, are a combination of the sight and touch with the artificial aspects made by a scratch, a fracture, the blowpipe, the application of an acid, the measurement of the angles. A complex impression is thus made up and, by repetition, stamped on the mind; and at an after time, any one of the characteristic properties will revive the total conception of the mineral. So in chemistry, each substance is conceived not simply as seen and handled by itself, but as acted on by many other substances, by changes of temperature and the like. The chemist's notion of sulphur is a large aggregate of appearances and sensations produced in various ways; it is, in fact, the notion of a great collection of substances the compounds of sulphur-as odour of burnt brimstone, oil of vitriol, salts of sulphuric acid, compounds of sulphur with metals, &c. In like manner, the properties of a plant are not completely summed up and aggregated in the mind, till in addition to all the aspects it presents by itself, other plants are taken along with it, as of the same species, genus, and family. These cases are nearly parallel to an example occurring under the immediately preceding head, namely, tools and machinery, where the present aspect has to be augmented with other appearances manifested when they are put to their practical uses.

In these mineral and chemical aggregates there is great scope for proving the force of contiguous association, but still more for testing the disposition to dwell upon artificial combinations, the results of previous analysis or forced separation of natural conjunctions. Science, as I shall afterwards have occasion to illustrate, is painful from the necessity of dis-associating appearances that go naturally and easily together, of renouncing the full and total aspect of an object by which it engages agreeably the various senses, and of settling upon some

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feature that has no interest to the common eye. Those compounds of sulphur that have to be conjoined with the simple substance as a part of its idea, are constantly viewed by the chemist under the one aspect of composition or decomposition in the contact with other bodies; the appearance of any single substance to the eye signifies nothing, and may be wholly irrelevant to any purpose of his.

SUCCESSIONS.

58. If we except complex and coinciding muscular movements, and the concurrence of sensations through different senses at the same moment, all associations are successive to the mind, seeing that we must pass from the one to the other, both in the original experience and in the subsequent recollection. The features of a landscape can be conceived only by successive movements of the mind, as it can be seen only by successive movements of the eye. But I here contrast the successions, movements, events, and changes of the world, with still life, the status quo, or the contemporaneous aspect of nature, and I mean now to allude to the procession of the universe in time, as a consequence of the properties of movement and change impressed upon it.

We may notice first the successions that go round in a cycle, without shock or interruption, as day and night, the phases of the moon, the course of the seasons. The different aspects

presented by the sky above and the world around, in the course of the solar day, are associated in our minds in their regular order, and anticipated accordingly. This cyclical association makes up one part of our knowledge, or experience, of the world, and guides our actions in accordance with it. These slow and tranquil changes become coherent under almost the very same conditions as the aspects of still life that we view in succession by moving from place to place. The two cases are very different in themselves, but to the mind the contemporaneous in reality is the successive in idea. The chief distinction lies in this, that the flow of moving nature is