mind, itself being rather a law of matter, at least of phaenomena
considered as material. At the utmost, it is to thought the same, as
the law of gravitation is to loco-motion. In every voluntary movement
we first counteract gravitation, in order to avail ourselves of it. It
must exist, that there may be a something to be counteracted, and
which, by its re-action, may aid the force that is exerted to resist
it. Let us consider what we do when we leap. We first resist the
gravitating power by an act purely voluntary, and then by another act,
voluntary in part, we yield to it in order to alight on the spot,
which we had previously proposed to ourselves. Now let a man watch his
mind while he is composing; or, to take a still more common case,
while he is trying to recollect a name; and he will find the process
completely analogous. Most of my readers will have observed a small
water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted
shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the
brook; and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up
against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion,
now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather
strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no
unapt emblem of the mind's self-experience in the act of thinking.
There are evidently two powers at work, which relatively to each other
are active and passive; and this is not possible without an
intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive. In
philosophical language, we must denominate this intermediate faculty
in all its degrees and determinations, the IMAGINATION. But, in common
language, and especially on the subject of poetry, we appropriate the
name to a superior degree of the faculty, joined to a superior
voluntary control over it.

Contemporaneity, then, being the common condition of all the laws of