Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/195

 the clear preservation of this distinction is essential to the soundness of the mind; for to be liable to uncertainty, in endeavouring to distinguish the records of memory from the creations of the fancy, is the symptom of an impaired and decaying intellect.

Although the predominance of the Conceptive Faculty during the first years of life has been so little considered as not to have been calculated upon in our schemes of education, yet nothing is more conspicuous than the fact. The instances in which its operation may be observed are of several kinds, as firstwhenever any familiar object or person is recognized, after an interval, by a child; as when a brother, or sister, or a nurse, after an absence, is greeted by a smile of familiarity, and the arms are extended; for an infant, in this instance, connects the now present objectnot with the same object before seen; but with the image of it conserved by the mind. The reader, if not much accustomed to analyze his own notions of mental operations, may perhaps need to have the simple fact pointedly referred to, that what is meant by remembering, or recognizing something now before the eye, isthe connecting the immediate impression on the senses, with a previously admitted and treasured idea or image, and which has been preserved by the mind with so much fidelity as to leave not a shadow of doubt, in most cases, concerning the identity of the object. So soon, therefore, as an infant is observed to recognize any thing or person, and of which recognition it gives indubitable signs, so soon may we be sure that the conceptive faculty has come into operation, and this happens certainly in the third month, and often much earlier.

Or if we go on to the time when the notion of property has just got a lodgement in the mind, we may meet with a pertinent instance of the vivacity of the conceptive power, when the little stickler for its rights finds its own horse or