He who has given us, in one simple principle, the power of reviving the past, has not made his gift so unavailing. The feelings, which this wonderful principle preserves and restores, arise, not loosely and confusedly—for what is there in the whole wide scene of nature, which does so occur?—but, according to general laws or tendencies of succession, contrived with the most admirable adaptation to our wants, so as to bring again before us the knowledge formerly acquired by us, at the very time when it is most profitable that it should return. A value is thus given to experience, which otherwise would not be worthy of the name; and we are enabled to extend it almost at pleasure, so as to profit, not merely by that experience which the events of nature, occurring in conformity with these general laws, must at any rate have afforded to us,—but to regulate this very experience itself,—to dispose objects and events, so that, by tendencies of suggestion, on the firmness of which we may put perfect reliance, they shall give us, perhaps at the distance of many years, such lessons as we may wish them to yield,—and thus to invent and create, in a great measure, the intellectual and moral history of our future life, as an epic or dramatic writer arranges at his will the continued scenes of his various and magnificent narrative. I need not add, that it is on this skilful management of the laws, which regulate our trains of thought, the whole theory and practice of education are founded;—that art, which I have already repeatedly represented to you as the noblest of all the arts of man—itself the animating spirit of every other art—which exerts its own immediate operation, not on lifeless things, but on the affections and faculties of the soul itself—and which has raised us from the dust, where we slept or trembled, in sluggish, yet ferocious ignorance, the victims of each other, and of every element around us, to be the sharers and diffusers of the blessings of social polity, the measurers of the earth and of the skies, and the rational worshippers of that eternal Being by whom they and we were created.
That there is a tendency of ideas to suggest each other, without any renewed perception of the external objects which originally excited them, and that the suggestion is not, altogether loose and indefinite, but that certain ideas have a peculiar tendency to suggest certain other relative ideas in associate trains of thought, is too familiar to you, as a general fact of our intellectual nature, to require to be illustrated by example.
It has been beautifully compared, by the most philosophic of our poets, to the mutual influence of two sympathetic needles, which Strada, in one of his Prolusions, availing himself of a supposed fact, which was then believed, or scarcely doubted by many philosophers, makes the subject of verses, supposed to be recited by Cardinal Bembo, in the character of Lucretius. The needles were fabled to have been magnetized together, and suspended over different circles, so as to be capable of moving along an alphabet. In these circumstances, by the remaining influence of their original kindred magnetism, they were supposed, at whatever distance, to follow each other's motions, and pause accordingly at the same point; so that, by watching them at concerted hours, the friends, who possessed this happy telegraph, were supposed to be able to communicate to each other their feelings, with the same accuracy and confidence as when they were together.
“For when the different images of things,
By chance combin'd have struck the attentive soul
With deeper impulse, or, connected long,
Have drawn his frequent eye; howe'er distinct
The external scenes, yet oft the ideas gain
From that conjunction an eternal tie
And sympathy unbroken. Let the Mind