Page:Essays on the Principles of Human Action (1835).djvu/125

 nature after the same manner that they exist in the human mind. The forms of things in nature are manifold; they only become one by being united in the same common principle of thought. The relations of the things themselves as they exist separately and by themselves must therefore be very different from their relations as perceived by the mind where they have an immediate communication with each other. The things themselves can only have the same relation to each other that the ideas of things have in different minds, or that our sensible impressions must have to one another before we refer them to some inward conscious principle. Without this conscious connection between our ideas in the mind there could be no preference of one thing to another, no choice of means to ends; that is, no voluntary action. Suppose the ideas or impressions of any two objects to be perfectly distinct and vivid: suppose them moreover to be mechanically associated together in my mind, and that they bear in fact just the same proportion to each other that the objects do in nature: suppose that the one is attended with just so much more pleasure than the other, and is so much more desirable: what effect can this of itself have but to produce a proportionable degree of unthinking complacency in the different feelings belonging to each, and a proportionable degree of vehemence in the blind impulse, by which I am attached to each of them