with his system, which was exclusively material and mechanical. Far otherwise is it with Des Cartes; greatly as he too, in his after writings, (and still more egregiously his followers, De la Forge, and others,) obscured the truth by their attempts to explain it on the theory of nervous fluids and material configurations. But in his interesting work "De Methodo," Des Cartes relates the circumstance which first led him to meditate on this subject, and which since then has been often noticed and employed as an instance and illustration of the law. A child who, with its eyes bandaged, had lost several of his fingers by amputation, continued to complain for many days successively of pains, now in his joint, and now in that of the very fingers which had been cut off. Des Cartes was led by this incident to reflect on the uncertainty with which we attribute any particular place to any inward pain or uneasiness, and proceeded, after long consideration, to establish it as a general law, that contemporaneous impressions, whether images or sensations, recal each other mechanically. On this principle, as a ground work, he built up the whole system of human language, as one continued process of association. He showed in what sense not only general terms, but generic images, (under the name of abstract ideas,) actually existed, and in what consists their nature and power. As one word may become the general exponent of many, so, by association, a simple image may represent a whole class. But in truth, Hobbs himself makes no claims to any discovery, and introduces this law of association, or, (in his own language,) discursus mentalis, as an admitted fact, in the solution alone of which it is, by causes purely physiological, he arrogates any originality. His system is briefly this: whenever the senses are impinged on by external objects, whether by the rays of light reflected from them, or by effluxes of their finer particles, there results a correspondent motion of the innermost and subtlest organs. This mo tion constitutes a representation, and there remains an impression of the same, or a certain disposition to repeat the same motion. Whenever we feel several objects at the same time, the impressions that are left (or, in the language of Mr. Hume, the ideas) are linked together. Whenever, therefore, any one of the movements which constitute a complex impression, are renewed through the senses, the others succeed mechanically. It follows of necessity, therefore, that Hobbs, as well as Hartley, and all others who derive as

sociation from the connexion and interdependence of the supposed matter, the movements of which constitute our thoughts, must have reduced all its forms to the one law of time. But even the merit of announcing this law with philosophic precision cannot be fairly conceded to him. For the objects of any two ideas * need not have co-existed in the same sensation in order to become mutually associable. The same result will follow, when one only of the two ideas has been represented by the senses, and the other by the memory.

Long, however, before either Hobbs or Des Cartes, the law of association had been defined, and its important functions set forth by Melanchthon, Ammerbach, and Ludovicus Vives; more especially by the last. Phantasia, it is to be noticed, is employed by Vives to express the mental power of comprehension, or the active function of the mind; and imaginatio for the receptivity (vis receptiva) of impressions, or for the passive perception. The power of combination he appropriates to the former:-"quæ singula et simpliciter acceperat imaginatio, ea conjungit et disgungit phantasia." And the law by which the thoughts are spontaneously pre

*I here use the word "idea" in Mr. Hume's sense, on account of its general currency among the English metaphysicians, though against my own judgment; for I believe that the vague use of this word has been the cause of much error and more confusion. The word Idea, in its original sense, as used by Pindar, Aristophanes, and in the gospel of Matthew, represented the visual abstraction of a distant object, when we see the whole without distinguishing its parts. Plato adopted it as a technical term, and as the antithesis to Edwλa, or sensuous images; the transient and perishable emblems, or mental words, of ideas. The ideas themselves he considered as mysterious powers, living, seminal, formative, and exempt from time. In this sense the word became the property of the Platonic school; and it seldom occurs in Aristotle, without some such phrase annexed to it, as according to Plato, or as Plato says. Our English writers to the end of Charles 2nd's reign, or somewhat later, employed it either in the original sense, or Platonically, or in a sense nearly correspondent to our present use of the substantive, Ideal, always, however, opposing it, more or less, to image, whether of present or absent objects. The reader will not be displeased with the following interesting exemplification from bishop Jeremy Taylor: "St. Lewis the king sent Ivo bishop of Chartres on an embassy, and he told, that he met a grave and stately matron on the way, with a censer of fire in one hand, and a vessel of water in the other; and observing her to have a melancholy, religious, and phantastic deportment and look, he asked her what those symbols meant, and what she meant to do with her fire and water; she answered, my purpose is with the fire to burn paradise, and with my water to quench the flames of hell, that men may serve God purely for the love of God. But we rarely meet with such spirits, which love virtue so metaphysically as to abstract her from all sensible composi tions, and love the purity of the idea." Des Cartes having introduced into his philosophy the fanciful hypothesis of material ideas, or certain configurations of the brain, which were as so many moulds to the influxes of the external world; Mr. Locke adopted the term, but extended its signification to whatever is the immediate object of the mind's attention or consciousness. Mr. Hume, distinguishing those representations which are accompanied with a sense of a present object, from those reproduced by the mind itself, designated the former by impressions, and confined the word idea to the latter.

66

sented follows thus:-" quæ simul sunt a phantasa comprehensa si alterutrum occurrat, solet secum alterum representare." To time, therefore, he subordinates all the other exciting causes of association. The soul proceeds a causa ad affectum, ab hoc ad instrumentum, a parte ad totum ;" thence to the place, from place to person, and from this to whatever preceded or followed, all as being parts of a total impression, each of which may recal the other. The apparent springs "Saltus vel transitus etiam longisimos," he explains by the same thought having been a component part of two or more total impressions. Thus "ex Scipione venio incogitationem potentiæ Turcicæ proper victorias ejus in ea parte Asiæ in qua regnabat Antiochus."

But from Vives I pass at once to the source of his doctrines, and (as far as we can judge from the remains yet extant of Greek philosophy) as to the first, so to the fullest and most perfect enunciation of the associative principle, viz: to the writings of Aristotle ; and of these principally to the books “De Anima,” “ De Memoria,” and that which is entitled in the old translations "Parva Naturalia." In as much as later writers have either deviated from, or added to his doctrines, they appear to me to have introduced either error or groundless supposition.

In the first place, it is to be observed, that Aristotle's positions on this subject are unmixed with fiction. The wise Stagyrite speaks of no successive particles propagating motion like billiard balls, (as Hobbs ;) nor of nervous or animal spirits, where inanimate and irrational solids are thawed down, and distilled, or filtrated by ascension, into living and intelligent fluids, that etch and re-etch engravings on the brain, (as the followers of Des Cartes, and the humoral pathologists in general ;) nor of an oscillating ether which was to effect the same service for the nerves of the brain considered as solid fibres, as the animal spirits perform for them under the notion of hollow tubes, (as Hartley teaches)-nor finally, (with yet more recent dreamers,) of chemical compositions by elective affinity, or of an electric light at once the immediate object and the ultimate organ of inward vision, which rises to the brain like an Aurora Borealis, and there disporting in various shapes, (as the balance of plus and minus, or negative and positive, is destroyed or re-established,) images out both past and present. Aristotle delivers a just theory, without pretending to an hypothesis; or in other words,

a comprehensive survey of the different facts, and of their relations to each other, without supposition, i. e. a fact placed under a number of facts, as their common support and explanation; though in the majority of instances, these hypotheses or suppositions better deserve the name of Troomsεis, or suffictions. He uses, indeed, the word Kivnssis, to express what we call representations or ideas, but he carefully distinguishes them from material motion, designating the latter always by annexing the words Ev row, or xara On the contrary, in his treatise "De Anima," he excludes place and motion from all the operations of thought, whether representations or volitions, as attributes utterly and absurdly heterogeneous,

TOTOV.

The general law of association, or more accurately the common condition under which all exciting causes act, and in which they may be generalized, according to Aristotle, is this: Ideas, by having been together, acquire a power of recalling each other; or every partial representation awakes the total representation of which it had been a part. In the practical determination of this common principle to particular recollections, he admits five agents or occasioning causes: 1st, connection in time, whether simultaneous, preceding or successive; 2d, vicinity or connection in space; 3d, interdependence or necessary connection, as cause and effect; 4th, likeness; and 5th, contrast. As an additional solution of the occasional seeming chasms in the continuity of reproduction, he proves that movements or ideas possessing one or the other of these five characters had passed through the mind as intermediate Jinks, sufficiently clear to recal other parts of the same total impressions with which they had co-existed, though not vivid enough to excite that degree of attention which is requisite for distinct recollection, or as we may aptly express it, after-consciousness. In association, then, consists the whole mechanism of the reproduction of impressions, in the Aristotelian Psychology. It is the universal law of the passive fancy and mechanical memory; that which supplies to all other faculties their objects, to all thought the elements of its materials.

In consulting the excellent commentary of St. Thomas Aquinas on the Parva Naturalia of Aristotle, I was struck at once with its close resemblance to Hume's essay on association. The main thoughts were the same in both, the order of the thoughts was the

same, and even the illustrations differed only by Hume's occasional substitution of more modern examples. I mentioned the circumstance to several of my literary acquaintances, who admitted the closeness of the resemblance, and that it seemed too great to be explained by mere coincidence; but they thought it improbable that Hume should have held the pages of the angelic Doctor worth turning over. But some time after, Mr. Payne, of the King's mews, showed Sir James Mackintosh some odd volumes of St. Thomas Aquinas, partly perhaps from having heard that Sir James (then Mr.) Mackintosh had in his lectures past a high encomium on this canonized philosopher, but chiefly from the fact, that the volumes had belonged to Mr. Hume, and had here and there marginal marks and notes of reference in his own hand writing. Among these volumes was that which contains the Parva Naturalia, in the old latin version, swathed and swaddled in the commentary afore mentioned !

It remains, then, for me, first, to state wherein Hartley differs from Aristotle; then, to exhibit the grounds of my conviction, that he differed only to err; and next, as the result, to show, by what influences of the choice and judgment the associative power becomes either memory or fancy; and, in conclusion, to appropriate the remaining offices of the mind to the reason and the imagination. With my best efforts to be as perspicuous as the nature of language will permit on such a subject, I earnestly solicit the good wishes and friendly patience of my readers, while I thus go "sounding on my dim and perilous way."