_Common Theory._--The view which has been very generally entertained of the faculty now under consideration, both in this country, and by the Scotch philosophers, resolves it partially or wholly into other powers of the mind, as abstraction, association, judgment, taste. In this view, it is no longer a simple faculty, if indeed it can with propriety be called a faculty at all, inasmuch as the effects ascribed to it can be accounted for by the agency of the other powers now named. _A different View._--It seems to me that imagination, while doubtless it presupposes and involves the exercise of the suggestive and associative principle, of the analytic or divisive principle by which compounds are broken up into their distinct elements, and also, to some extent, of judgment, or the principle which perceives relations, is, nevertheless, itself a power distinct from each of these, and from all of them in combination. Memory _presupposes_ perception, or something to be reproduced and remembered. It is not, therefore, to be regarded as a complex faculty, comprising the perceptive power as one of its factors. The power to combine, in like manner, _presupposes_ the previous separation of elements capable of being reunited, but is not to be resolved into that power which produces such separation. It _involves_ some exercise of judgment along with its own proper and distinctive activity, but is not to be confounded with, or resolved into the power of perceiving relations. The faculty of ideal conception is really a power of the mind, and it is a simple power, a thing of itself, although it may involve and presuppose the activity of other faculties along with its own. Abstraction, association, judgment, taste--none of them singly, nor all of them combined, are what we mean by it.