Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/204

 sensations, but those acquired perceptions which give us the notion of things as they are, that bear sway in the conceptive faculty. Itis to its picture gallery of the visible world that the mind retires at every moment when it is not occupied by that world itself: it is over these images that it exerts a plastic power, recombining the elements they consist of, in an infinite diversity of modes; and itis out of these same elements, fantastically consorted, that those magic halls are stocked and ornamented, through which the soul flits and roams during sleep.

The furniture of the conceptive faculty, as derived from the objects of sight, constitutes the principal wealth of the mind, and upon the ready command of these treasures, with some specific end in view, depends in great measure its power. The quality and the extent of these ideal stores, and the degree in which they are available as materials for the other faculties to work upon, are a chief reason of the vast difference between one mind and another, and generally of the difference between cultured and uncultured minds. Whatever may be the path of exertion pursued by any one, and even if it lead over ground the most remote from the regions of the imagination, it will still be true that, if the conceptive faculty in the particular department which the mind occupies, be full fraught with its proper objects, and be prompt in producing its stores, such a mind will take the lead among others.

The statesman, disposing of the driest details of public business, the merchant, calculating the chances of a distant enterprise, the lawyer, working his way through the most abstruse relations of right and property, all advance with rapidity and ease, or with a sluggish and stumbling step, according to the vivacity and richness of the conceptive faculty. For just as we comprehend and deal with things actually before the eye far more readily and certainly than we can with such as are out of sight; so do