Of Coleridge and Mahan.—Coleridge, followed by Mahan, regards imagination as the power which recombines the several elements of thought into conceptions, which conform not to mere existences, but to certain fundamental ideas in the mind itself, ideas of the beautiful, sublime, etc.
These Definitions agree in what.—These definitions, it will be perceived, with scarcely an exception make imagination to be a complex faculty, and regard it as merely the power of combining, in new forms, the various elements of thought already in the mind. The correctness of each of these ideas has been already discussed.
INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES.
PART THIRD.
THE REFLECTIVE POWER.
GENERAL OBSERVATIONS.
Office of this Power.—We have thus far treated of that power of the mind by which it takes cognizance of objects as directly presented to sense, and also of that by which it represents to itself former objects of cognition in their absence. But a large portion of our knowledge and of our mental activity does not fall under either of these divisions. There is a class of mental operations which differs from the former, in that they do not give us directly sensations or perceptions of things, do not present objects themselves; and from the latter, in that they do not represent to the thought absent objects of perception; which differ from both, in that they deal not with the things themselves, but with the properties and relations of things—not with the concrete, but with the abstract and general. This class of operations, to distinguish it from the preceding classes, we have named, in our analysis, the reflective power of the mind. It comprises a large part of our mental activity.