_Theory of Brown._--Dr. Brown resolves the faculty now in question into simple suggestion, accompanied, in the case of _voluntary_ imagination, with desire, and with judgment. There is nothing in the process different from what occurs in any case of the suggestion of one thought by another, he would say. We think of a mountain, we think of gold, and some analogy, or common property of the two, serves to suggest the complex conception, mountain of gold. Even where the process is not purely spontaneous, but accompanied with desire on our part, it is still essentially the same process. We think of something, and this suggests other related conceptions, some of which we approve as fit for our purpose, others we reject as unfit. Here is simple suggestion accompanied with desire and judgment; and these are all the factors that enter into the process. "We may term this state, or series of states, imagination or fancy, and the term may be convenient for its brevity. But in using it we must not forget that the term, however brief and simple, is still the name of a state that is complex, or of a succession of states, that the phenomena comprehended under it being the same in nature, are not rendered, by the use of a mere word, different from those to which we have already given peculiar names expressive of them as they exist separately, and that it is to the classes of these elementary phenomena, therefore, that we must refer the whole process of imagination in our philosophic analysis." _Strictures on this Theory._--This view, it will be perceived, in reality sweeps the faculty of imagination entirely from the field. To this I cannot yield my assent. Is not this state, or affection of the mind, as Dr. Brown calls it, quite a distinct thing from other mental states and affections? Has it not a character _sui generis_? Is not the operation, the thing done, a _different_ thing from what is done in other cases, and by other faculties; and has not the mind the _power_ of doing this new and different thing; and is not that power of doing a given thing what we mean in any case by a _faculty_ of the mind? Is there not an element in this process under consideration which is _not_ involved in other mental processes, viz.: the _ideal_ element; the conception, not of the actual and the real, as in the case of the other faculties, but of the purely ideal? And if the mind has the faculty of forming a class of conceptions so entirely distinct from the others, why not give that faculty a name, and its own proper name, and allow it a place, its own proper place, among the mental powers? § V.--IMAGINATION NOT MERELY THE POWER OF COMBINATION.