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THE HOLY TRINITY.
597
is as good as the waste of valuable time. Hence, ideas which are associated with familiar ideas are more lasting than fragments of knowledge forced on the will.
The characteristic of mind is that it can be conscious of only one idea, or state of consciousness, at a time, though this idea, or state, need not be a simple one, but may be as complex as imagination can picture, provided that it is a compact, well-connected whole. Hence, any fact, or state of consciousness, which does not find its appropriate place in the idea, or feeling, in possession of the field of consciousness, will not be readily admitted, or remembered. It is this peculiarity of the will also which explains its dislike to be burdened with stray thoughts, or odds and ends of knowledge.
The close connection between the faculty of recollection and will is further evident from the fact that when we jog the memory to recall some forgotten event, it is the will alone which is put to the strain, that is, reflected. Some people think that recollections share the nature of mental concepts which, they maintain, exist in the brain. What is precisely meant by this statement is not easy to comprehend, unless it be that concepts and ideas exist somewhere in the matter of the brain, with their definite outlines and 'individualities,' in other words, as ready-made images. It thus becomes necessary to see what a concept can possibly mean.
Proceeding from the material object perceived in the physical world, we get first of all the object itself whose representation in the mind is called percept. In the absence of the object, its recollection is a memory image which lacks the concreteness of the percept.
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