association. In a mind entirely uncultivated, which is also without
any strong feelings, objects whether of sense or of intellect arrange
themselves in the mere casual order in which they have been seen,
heard, or otherwise perceived. Persons of this sort may be said to
think chronologically. If they remember a fact, it is by reason of a
fortuitous coincidence with some trifling incident or circumstance
which took place at the very time. If they have a story to tell, or
testimony to deliver in a witness-box, their narrative must follow the
exact order in which the events took place: _dodge_ them, and the
thread of association is broken; they cannot go on. Their
associations, to use the language of philosophers, are chiefly of the
successive, not the synchronous kind, and whether successive or
synchronous, are mostly casual.

To the man of science, again, or of business, objects group themselves
according to the artificial classifications which the understanding
has voluntarily made for the convenience of thought or of practice.
But where any of the impressions are vivid and intense, the
associations into which these enter are the ruling ones: it being a
well-known law of association, that the stronger a feeling is, the
more quickly and strongly it associates itself with any other object
or feeling. Where, therefore, nature has given strong feelings, and
education has not created factitious tendencies stronger than the
natural ones, the prevailing associations will be those which connect
objects and ideas with emotions, and with each other through the
intervention of emotions. Thoughts and images will be linked together,
according to the similarity of the feelings which cling to them. A
thought will introduce a thought by first introducing a feeling which
is allied with it. At the centre of each group of thoughts or images
will be found a feeling; and the thoughts or images will be there only
because the feeling was there. The combinations which the mind puts
together, the pictures which it paints, the wholes which Imagination
constructs out of the materials supplied by Fancy, will be indebted to
some dominant _feeling_, not as in other natures to a dominant
_thought_, for their unity and consistency of character, for what
distinguishes them from incoherencies.

The difference, then, between the poetry of a poet, and the poetry of
a cultivated but not naturally poetic mind, is, that in the latter,
with however bright a