*****
A silver shield with boss of gold,
That spreads itself, some faery bold
In fight to cover!
Dr. James recognizes this fact and illustrates it. "The higher poets," he says, "all use abrupt epithets, and, as Emerson says, sweetly torment us with invitations to their inaccessible homes."[1] Genius—from the association standpoint—is thus association through the concentration of thought upon the subtlest and remotest elements of its objects and then the successive recognition of these elements in ever widening circles of life.
One important distinction has not yet been made: that between Spontaneous and Voluntary Association. Aristotle was first in this discussion as in so many others. His theory of association has chief reference[2] to recollection (ἀνάμνησις) or willed redintegration, and applies certainly, but only incidentally, to the involuntary sort. The whole process, which St. Augustine[3] and Hobbes[4] and Mr. Hodgson[5] and especially Dr. James[6] have described at length and illustrated, is really indicated in Aristotle's one word θήρευσις (the chase). It is the effort to recall something forgotten or to discover something which we do not know. In either case, we of course know something about that which we call "entirely forgotten" or "unknown," else we should not be aware of our own ignorance. We know what other phenomena of consciousness are related to this which we seek and we know something of the relation. The method of recollection is the same in both cases: simply the accentuation of the related phenomena,—and, for the rest, a blind reliance on this ultimate, unexplained fact of association, which, whether it be psychical or physical or both, we certainly do not further understand.
Wellesley College.
