NewThoughtLibrary.com / DivineLibrary.org

loose, parallel, independent lines of phenomenal being, bears with it the interlacing thread of intuition, and shortly weaves all into a firm, coherent fabric, a system of things. The steadfastness and permanence of the work are secured by memory, while its brilliancy, the vividness of its coloring, arise from imagination. We thus seem to see some reason why these faculties, and no others, are called for. The judgment, under the eye of reason, knits together facts into relations, which make them significant and intelligible, which show them to be a system of things; the memory stands by to proffer the facts, and store the fabric; while the imagination dips again in living colors these shadow products of the mind, as the sun saturates the cloud with its own hues.

Lesson 42 - 14. Judgment and association - p.172

CHAPTER IV. - THE REASON.

14. There are very important laws of thought in connection with the understanding of which but slight mention has so far been made, those of association.

Association is brought forward to explain many processes of mind; we believe that association is rather the result of these processes. Ideas, images are not associated in the mind otherwise than as it itself binds them together. Reflections in a mirror gain no coherence, have no power to restore each other. Aside from the analogy of physical habit, which is of narrow, indirect application to mental phenomena, we have no reason to believe that ideas as ideas can maintain a sequence among themselves, the first idea bringing with it the second, the second the third. It is judgment, memory, imagination that separately or in combination restore ideas and images; in these faculties, not in themselves, are found the laws of coherence. Involution, causation, resemblance are the primary connections of judgment, and time and place of the imagination and memory. "When Hamilton resolves the laws of association first into simultaneity and affinity, and then into the one law of redintegration