THE IMAGINATION is another term, the explanation of which will be found to be included in the expositions which have previously been given. The phenomena classed under this title are explained, by modern Philosophers, on the principles of Association. Their accounts of the mental process, to which the name Imagination is applied, include their explanation of the laws of Association, or the manner in which ideas succeed one another in a train, with little else, except remarks on the causes to which diversity in the several kinds of Imagination may be traced. It is not to be overlooked that the term IMAGINATION is here used in the sense which is given to it by philosophers when they rank it as a particular power of the mind; for it is no doubt true, that it is often used, in vulgar speech, as synonymous with Conception, and with Supposition, and with Conjecture; as the verb, to imagine, is, with the verbs, to discover, to suppose, conjecture, believe, and perhaps others. We have seen that Consciousness, and Conception, are names of feelings, _taken one by one_: Consciousness {239} of _any_ of our feelings so taken; Conception of a _particular class_ of them, namely, complex ideas. IMAGINATION is not a name of any one idea. I am not said to imagine, unless I combine ideas successively in a less or greater number. An imagination, therefore, is the name of a _train_. I am said to have an imagination when I have a train of ideas; and when I am said to imagine, I have the same thing; nor is there any train of ideas, to which the term imagination may not be applied. In this comprehensive meaning of the word Imagination, there is no man who has not Imagination, and no man who has it not in an equal degree with any other. Every man imagines, nay, is constantly, and unavoidably, imagining. He cannot help imagining. He can no more stop the current of his ideas, than he can stop the current of his blood. In the phrase we have just employed, "there is no man who has not imagination," it is meant, that there is no man who now has not, who has not always had, and who will not always have a train of ideas. Imagination, therefore, is a word connoting _indefinite time_; it is, to use the language of the Greek grammarians, aoristical. When it connotes, which by the strain of the passage it may be made to do, a _particular time_, it marks a _particular train_. When it connotes _time indefinitely_, it marks _trains indefinitely_, any train at any time. The having or doing a thing at any time, means the potentiality of having or doing it. Imagination, then, has two meanings. It means either some one train, or the potentiality of a train. These are two meanings which it is very necessary not to confound.