Page:Essays on the Principles of Human Action (1835).djvu/117

 why certain ideas affect the mind differently from others: and by what means we are enabled to form comparisons and draw inferences.

If association were every thing, and the cause of every thing, there could be no comparison of one idea with another, no reasoning, no abstraction, no regular contrivance, no wisdom, no general sense of right and wrong, no humanity, no foresight of any thing, in short nothing that is essential, or honourable to the human mind would be left to it. Accordingly, the abettors of this theory have set themselves to shew, that judgment, imagination, &c. are mere words that really signify nothing but certain associations of ideas following one another in the same mechanical order in which they were originally impressed, and that all our feelings, tastes, habits and actions spring from the same source. As I know of no proof whatever that has been or can be given of either of these paradoxes but that many of our opinions are prejudices, and that many of our feelings arise from habit, I shall here proceed to state as concisely as I can my reasons for thinking that association alone does not account either for the proper operations of the understanding, or for our moral feelings, and voluntary actions; and that there are other general, original, independent faculties equally necessary and more important in the "building up of the human mind." In every comparison made by the mind of one idea with another, that is, in the perception of agreement, or disagreement, or of any kind of relation between them, I conceive there is something implied which is essentially different from any association of ideas. Before I proceed, however, I must repeat that in this question I stand merely on the defensive. I have no positive inferences to make, nor any novelties to bring forward, and I have only to defend a common-sense feeling against the refinements of