Elements of the philosophy of the human mind. By Dugald Stewart. Rev. and abridged, with critical and explanatory notes, for the use of colleges and schools. By Francis Bowen ...

158 THE ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS.
indeed, a very intimate relation; and it is probably owrine to
this relation, that they have been so generally confounded under
the same name. When the mind is occupied about absent objects of sense, (which, I believe, it is habitually in the great
majority of mankind,) its train of thought is merely a series of
conceptions; or, in common language, of imaginations. In the
case, too, of poetical imagination, it is the association of ideas
that supplies the materials out of which its combinations are
formed; and when such an imaginary combination is become
familiar to the mind, it is the association of ideas that connects
its different parts together, and unites them into one whole.
The association of ideas, therefore, although perfectly distinct
from the power of imagination, is immediately and essentially
subservient to all its exertions.
Fancy distinguished from imagination. - The last observation seems to me to point out, also, the circumstance which has
led the greater part of English writers to use the words imaclination and fancy as synonymous. It is obvious, that a creative
imagination, when a person possesses it so habitually that it
may be regarded as forming one of the characteristics of his
genius, implies a power of summoning up, at pleasure, a particular class of ideas, and of ideas related to each other in a
particular manner; which power can be the result only of certain habits of association, which the individual has acquired.
It is to this power of the mind, which is evidently a particular turn of thought, and not one of the common principles
of our nature, that our best writers (so far as I am able to
judge) refer, in general, when they make use of the wordfancy;
I say, in general; for in disquisitions of this sort, in which the
best writers are seldom precise and steady in the employment of
words, it is only to their prevailing practice that we can appeal
as an authority. What the particular relations are, by which
those ideas are connected that are subservient to poetical
imagination, I shall not inquire at present. I think they are
chiefly those of resemblance and analogy. But whatever they
may be, the power of summoning up at pleasure the ideas so
related, as it is the groundwork of poetical genius, is of suffi