Page:Essays on the Principles of Human Action (1835).djvu/104

 his apothecary to compound his medicines of, and whose hands are inured to the cutting up, and eyes to the inspection of anatomized bodies, should easily and with success, flie his thoughts at so towring a game, as a pure intellect, a separated and unbodied soul." I confess I feel in reading Hartley, something in the way in which the Dryads must have done shut up in their old oak trees. I feel my sides pressed hard, and bored with points of knotty inferences piled up one upon another without being able ever to recollect myself, or catch a glimpse of the actual world without me. I am somehow wedged in between different rows of material objects, overwhelming me by their throng, and from which I have no power to escape, but of which I neither know nor understand any thing. I constantly see objects multiplied upon me, not powers at work. I know no reason why one thing follows another but that something else is conjured up between them, which has as little apparent connection with either as they have with one another. Hartley always reasons from the concrete object, not from the abstract or essential properties of things, and in his whole book I do not believe there is one good definition. It would be a bad way to describe a man's character to say that he had a wise father or a foolish son; and yet this is the way in which Hartley defines ideas by stating what precedes them in the mind, and what comes after them. Thus he defines the will to be "that idea, or state of mind which precedes action;" or "a desire, or aversion sufficiently strong to produce action," &c. He gives you the outward signs of things in the order in which he conceives them to follow one another, but never the demonstration of certain consequences from the known nature of their causes, which alone is true reasoning. Nevertheless he was a great man. See his Chapter on Memory, &c.