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and obscure, is to darken counsel with words. If we would explain memory by its own facts, it would be our true empiricism. To create difficulties by the introduction of physical analogies into a field alien to them, and to seek their explication by a farther importation of imaginary states is a palpable violation of the principle of original, simple induction in each department of inquiry. It is a most vicious a priori method, disguised under the form of empirical investigation.

Lesson 31 - 8. Association as connected with memory Habit Growth - p.133

3. We need to distinguish memory from certain things with which it is in result allied. Association may restore facts to the mind with no direct effort of recollection, indeed, in hours of idle revery, with scarcely a distinct observation of their previous presence. This indolent flow of thought, mingling past, present, future, blending the real and the fanciful, submitting itself to the native cohesion of events and desires, is remembering, precisely as it is thinking. It is neither the one nor the other, consecutively, tensely, clearly; but is merely a succession of mental movements, holding on to each other, under a feeble impulse of pleasure, by accidental connections of thought, memory, fancy, acting the part of nimble servitors in this feast and repose of the desires. Association in large part rests upon memory, yet this easy natural movement of the mind, along certain trails of imagery which have been established by previous experience, serves to disguise the action of memory which underlies it. A certain sequence of impressions may be the result of many previous examples, yet directly recall no one of them, when, in the lazy flow of thought, the mind passes this way, using once more groups of conceptions which the entire past life has been combining. Much therefore rests upon memory in which its action is so far from being prominent, that its presence is hardly discerned. Much is thought to be original