Page:Essays on the Principles of Human Action (1835).djvu/107

 these several impressions thus compelled into agreement, and a kind of mutual understanding one with another after- wards retain a particular tendency or disposition to unite together; that is to say, the mind when thrown back into the same state by the recurrence of any one of these ideas is of course put into the way of admitting or passing more readily to any other of the same set of ideas than to any other ideas of a different set not so blended and harmonized with it. It seems as if the mind was laid open to all the impressions which had been made upon it at any given time, the moment any one of them recalls a state of feeling habitually in unison with the rest. By touching a certain spring, all obstacles are removed, the doors fly open, and the whole gallery is seen at a single glance. The mind has a capacity to perform any complex action the easier for having performed the same action before. It will consequently have a disposition to perform that action rather than any other, other circumstances being the same. I imagine that association is possibly to be accounted for on the same principle as a man's being able to comprehend or take in a mathematical demonstration the better for going over it a number of times, or to recognise any well-known object, as the figure of a man for instance in the middle of a common, sooner than a stump of a tree, or piece of a rock of twice the size, and of just as remarkable a shape. Consistently with this, we may suppose, if one impression is very like another, though not associated with it, that the mind will in that case slide more naturally, will feel less repugnance in passing from the recollection of the one to that of the other, that is from it's actual state into a state very little different from it, than into one of a totally different kind. When any particular idea becomes predominant, the turn which is thus given to the