Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/327

 THE DOUBLE KEKKfT OF MENTAL STIMULI. H1H Obscure metaphor in literature owes its inaccuracies to im- perfect consciousness of the things compared. I think it is a case in point when an eminent thinker speaks of the miml uf man as "turning upon the poles of Truth". It would seem that there can be no clear consciousness of anything corresponding to this phrase. Compare the vivid insight that gleams in the untutored similes of the Celtic peasant. " The thought came into rny mind quite sudden," said a Kerry man, " just as the sun shines out all at once on the mountain side." Carlyle abounds in striking examples. For one he com- pares the Reign of Terror to the black spot caused by a well spring which increases the more one tries to stamp it out. Really beautiful metaphor is always of this vivid, deeply- conscious kind, uttered in full sight of the things compared. Failing this, we may admire the great German poet whose peculiar merit is his abstinence from simile, his mind being wholly given to saying, not what the thing is like, but what it is. This characteristic of the poet Goethe argues a depth of aesthesis in him which corresponds also to his interest in the concrete, his dislike of the abstract, and to those indica- tions of intellectual inertia which made him so prone in earlier life to collect material rather than to build. Schiller, less deep, less resonant, had more creative impulse probably more kinesis, though not therefore in excess. That Goethe was on the whole of the aesthetic type I do not doubt. Per- haps the poet to be a great poet as also other seers must lean that way. He saw through Life and Death, through Good and III, He saw through his own Soul. The marvel of the Everlasting Will An open scroll Before him lay. (3) Some differences in memory as between one person and another may be inferred from this divergence of type. Retentiveness is probably a fundamental quality which varies in degree, so that all other things being equal one mind retains its mental impressions longer and with more certainty than another. But the very wide-spread popular notion that delects of memory do argue some defect in the vitality of the original impression at the instant, points to a truth. This vitality as we have seen is of two kinds the impression may be brilliant or it may be lively. The memory of it, therefore, may naturally be expected to show traces corresponding. And by this it is not merely meant that the revived impressions will reproduce the character of their