Page:Essays on the Principles of Human Action (1835).djvu/93

 from the greater strength of the impression, from similarity, &c. (This implies by the bye that the effect of association depends on the conjunction of many circumstances, and principles of action, and is not simply determined by the rela- tion of proximity or remoteness between our ideas with respect to time or place.) Thus if a person has done a number of good actions, which have been observed with pleasure by another, this approbation will be after- wards associated with the idea of the person, and the recol- lection of the benevolent disposition which gave birth to those actions remains, when the particular manner in which it was exerted is forgotten. First, because the feeling is the principal or strongest circumstance. Secondly, the association of our ideas with moral qualities is evidently assisted, and forced into the same general direction by the simplicity and uniform character of our feelings compared with the great variety of things and actions, which makes it impossible to combine such a number of distinct forms under the same general notion.

This is the whole extent and compass of the law of association. It has been said that this principle is of itself sufficient to account for all the phenomena of the human mind, and is the foundation of every rule of morality. My design is to show that neither of these assertions is absolutely true, or that it is absolutely idle to suppose that association is either the only mode of operation of the human mind, or that it is the primary and most general principle of thought and action.—But first of all it will be necessary to consider the account which Hartley himself has given of this principle as depending on the mechanical communication of motion from the seat of one idea to that of the next and so on, according to a previous local arrangement of these ideas in the brain; certainly, if thought is carried on in this