many and, in the end, a multitude in unity and a unity in multitude. Care must be taken not to accept ideas which though very agreeable at first disagree with us afterwards, and keep rising on our mental stomachs, as garlic does upon our bodily. Imagination i Imagination depends mainly upon memory, but there is a small percentage of creation of something out of nothing with it. We can invent a trifle more than can be got at by mere combination of remembered things. ii When we are impressed by a few only, or perhaps only one of a number of ideas which are bonded pleasantly together, there is hope; when we see a good many there is expectation; when we have had so many presented to us that we have expected confidently and the remaining ideas have not turned up, there is disappointment. So the sailor says in the play: “Here are my arms, here is my manly bosom, but where’s my Mary?” iii What tricks imagination plays! Thus, if we expect a person in the street we transform a dozen impossible people into him while they are still too far off to be seen distinctly; and when we expect to hear a footstep on the stairs—as, we will say, the postman’s—we hear footsteps in every sound. Imagination will make us see a billiard hall as likely to travel farther than it will travel, if we hope that it will do so. It will make us think we feel a train begin to move as soon as the guard has said “All right,” though the train has not yet begun to move if another train alongside begins to move exactly at this juncture, there is no man who will not be deceived. And we omit as much as we insert. We often do not notice that a man has grown a beard. iv I read once of a man who was cured of a dangerous illness by eating his doctor’s prescription which he understood was the medicine itself. So William Sefton Moorhouse [in New Zealand] imagined he was being converted to Christianity by reading Burton’s _Anatomy of Melancholy_, which he had got by mistake for Butler’s _Analogy_, on the recommendation of a friend. But it puzzled him a good deal. v At Ivy Hatch, while we were getting our beer in the inner parlour, there was a confused mêlée of voices in the bar, amid which I distinguished a voice saying: “Imagination will do any bloody thing almost.” I was writing _Life and Habit_ at the time and was much tempted to put this passage in. Nothing truer has ever been said about imagination. Then the voice was heard addressing the barman and saying: “I suppose you wouldn’t trust me with a quart of beer, would you?” Inexperience