ideas of most writers
upon metaphysics. Imagination, Memory, and Reason, have been long
introduced to our acquaintance as allegorical personages, and we have
insensibly learned to consider them as real beings. The "viewless
regions" of the soul, have been portioned out amongst these ideal
sovereigns; but disputes have, nevertheless, sometimes arisen
concerning the boundaries of intellectual provinces. Amongst the
disputed territories, those of Imagination have been most frequently
the seat of war; her empire has been subject to continual revolution;
her dominions have been, by potent invaders, divided and subdivided.
Fancy,[59] Memory,[60] Ideal presence,[61] and Conception,[62] have
shared her spoils.

By poets, imagination has been addressed as the great parent of
genius, as the arbiter, if not the creator, of our pleasures; by
philosophers, her name has been sometimes pronounced with horror; to
her fatal delusions, they have ascribed all the crimes and miseries of
mankind. Yet, even philosophers have not always agreed in their
opinions: whilst some have treated Imagination with contempt, as the
irreconcileable enemy of Reason, by others[63] she has been considered
with more respect, as Reason's inseparable friend; as the friend who
collects and prepares all the arguments upon which Reason decides; as
the injured, misrepresented power who is often forced to supply her
adversaries with eloquence, who is often called upon to preside at her
own trial, and to pronounce her own condemnation.

Imagination is "_the power_," we are told, of "_forming images_:" the
word image, however, does not, strictly speaking, express any thing
more than a representation of an object of sight; but the power of
imagination extends to objects of all the senses.

"I hear a voice you cannot hear,
Which says I must not stay.
I see a hand you cannot see,
Which beckons me away."

Imagination hears the voice, as well as sees the hand; by an easy
license of metaphor, what was originally used to express the operation
of our senses, is extended to them all. We do not precisely say, that
Imagination, forms _images_ of past sounds, or tastes, or smells; but
we say that she forms ideas of them; and ideas, we are told, are
mental images. It has been suggested by Dr. Darwin, that all these
analogies between images and thoughts have, probably, originated in
our observing the little pictures painted on the retina of the eye.

It is d