Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/179

 166 A. BAIN : involves the absolute denial of such a state of mind as the consciousness of agreement. Now in cases of extreme re- moteness of the objects brought together, there is a burst of excitement, which I have often called the flash of similarity, and which Mr. Ward treats as a pure fiction. The great classical instances of discoveries of generalisation, such as the Newtonian fetch involved in rising to universal gravity, cannot, I consider, be received by any mind in the same terms, and with the same emotion as an ordinary routine train of contiguous association ; for example, the phases of the moon as they have always impressed mankind. In like manner, the great strokes of identity in the poetical com- parisons of all ages give us an agreeable surprise, part of which is due to bringing together for the first time things never supposed to be like but, when once brought together, found capable of illustrating one another. The flash of a great discovery of identification is one ex- treme of the workings of Similarity. The other extreme is equally important in its bearings on the present question ; I mean the consciousness of identity without the power of resuscitation, a fact as energetically denied by Mr. Bradley as the other by Mr. Ward. My contention is, that times without number we are in this position, namely, that of something seen, or heard, or mentioned, we remark, ' I have seen or heard that before, but I cannot tell where or when '. This is a fact ; and is surely different from the state implied when I say ' That's new to me,' ' I never saw or heard that before '. Eecognition or sense of identity, without the power of recall, is the extreme instance of Similarity bereft of the aid of Contiguity. The previous impression, whose likeness to the present gives us the sense of recognition or repetition, is too feebly associated within itself to start into life again. That, to my mind, is the obvious rendering of the fact. A little more familiarity, in the first instance, would have strengthened the contiguous association between the parts of the resembling object and between it and col- lateral circumstances of time and place, and the result would have been, not a bare sense of identity with something un- known, but an actual resuscitation of the whole fact in its fulness and in its connexions with other things. The feeling of recognition or identity has a still wider sweep in assuring us that a train that we recall is accurately recalled. Often we have some misgiving lest we may not have recovered the precise series of particulars that we for- merly knew ; such misgiving is generally right, and leads us