ss from
the sunset light, because they have not been polluted by the wrath,
ravage, and misery of men.

Sec. 9. Association accidental. The extent of its influence.

By accidental association, I understand the accidental connection of
ideas and memories with material things, owing to which those material
things are regarded as agreeable or otherwise, according to the nature
of the feelings or recollections they summon; the association being
commonly involuntary and oftentimes so vague as that no distinct image
is suggested by the object, but we feel a painfulness in it or pleasure
from it, without knowing wherefore. Of this operation of the mind (which
is that of which I spoke as causing inextricable embarrassments on the
subject of beauty) the experience is constant, so that its more
energetic manifestations require no illustration. But I do not think
that the minor degrees and shades of this great influence have been
sufficiently appreciated. Not only all vivid emotions and all
circumstances of exciting interest leave their light and shadow on the
senseless things and instruments among which or through whose agency
they have been felt or learned, but I believe that the eye cannot rest
on a material form, in a moment of depression or exultation, without
communicating to that form a spirit and a life, a life which will make
it afterwards in some degree loved or feared, a charm or a painfulness
for which we shall be unable to account even to ourselves, which will
not indeed be perceptible, except by its delicate influence on our
judgment in cases of complicated beauty. Let the eye but rest on a rough
piece of branch of curious form during a conversation with a friend,
rest, however, unconsciously, and though the conversation be forgotten,
though every circumstance connected with it be as utterly lost to the
memory as though it had not been, yet the eye will, through the whole
life after, take a certain pleasure in such boughs which it had not
before, a pleasure so slight, a trace of feeling so delicate as to
leave us utterly unconscious of its peculiar power, but undestroyable by
any reasoning, a part, thenceforward, of our constitution, destroyable
only by the same arbitrary process of association by which it was
created. Reason has no effect upon it whatsoever. And there is probably
no one opinion which is formed by any of us, in matters of taste, which
is not in some degree influenced by unconscious association of