Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/202

 or a dog retains of a road he has only once travelled, and the notice he takes of any particular change in its objects, such as a fence, instead of a hedge, or a new road laid across an old one. But it is doubtful how far, or whether at all, any of the inferior classes of minds have the power to ponder absent objects, or to entertain the vacant seasons of their existence with images flitting before the fancy. Something of this sort may be probably conjectured; but it is manifest that, in this respect, the youngest or the rudest human mind vastly surpasses the most intellectual of the brutes.

It is, as I have said, by the firm linking of the conceptive faculty with words, that we acquire a ready and un-failing command of speech; and it is by means of the associations formed among ideas, whether imaginative or rationalconcrete or abstract, that the higher faculties exert their peculiar energies. The conceptive faculty is in these modes the ground-work of the entire intellectual system.

A little must be said concerning the relation of the senses, severally, to the conceptive faculty; and it will appear that, while certain impressions upon the senses are retained with the utmost precision and permanency, so as to be recognized infallibly after the longest intervals of time, when the impression is repeated, they come only in a very imperfect manner under the control of the mind, so as to be recalled apart from the external object. Thus, for example, the impressions of smell and taste are as well defined, and as permanent as those of sight; for a particular flavour or scent, as of a fruit or flower, familiar in child-hood, and then only, is recognized sixty years afterwards, when accidentally met with, and serves to recall a train of the bright images of early life. But it is only in a very vague manner, if at all, that impressions made upon these senses can be recalled to the mind, apart from their