436 LOGIC OP THE MORAL SCIENCES, 



remember our past joy or grief, though no new event of a 

 happy or painful nature has taken place. When a poet has 

 put together a mental picture of an imaginary object, a Castle 

 of Indolence, a Una, or a Hamlet, he can afterwards think of 

 the ideal object he has created, without any fresh act of intel- 

 lectual combination. This law is expressed by saying, in the 

 language of Hume, that every mental impression has its 

 idea. 



Secondly : These ideas, or secondary mental states, are 

 excited by our impressions, or by other ideas, according to 

 certain laws which are called Laws of Association. Of these 

 laws the first is, that similar ideas tend to excite one another. 

 The second is, that when two impressions have been frequently 

 experienced (or even thought of) either simultaneously or in 

 immediate succession, then whenever one of these impressions, 

 or the idea of it, recurs, it tends to excite the idea of the other. 

 The third law is, that greater intensity in either or both of the 

 impressions, is equivalent, in rendering them excitable by one 

 another, to a greater frequency of conjunction. These are the 

 laws of ideas : on which I shall not enlarge in this place, but 

 refer the reader to works professedly psychological, in parti- 

 cular to Mr. James Mill's Analysis of the Phenomena of the 

 Human Mind, where the principal laws of association, along 

 with many of their applications, are copiously exemplified, and 

 with a masterly hand.* 



These simple or elementary Laws of Mind have been ascer- 

 tained by the ordinary methods of experimental inquiry; nor 

 could they have been ascertained in any other manner. But 



* When this chapter was written, Mr. Bain had not yet published even the 

 first part ( ft The Senses and the Intellect") of his profound Treatise on the Mind. 

 In this, the laws of association have been more comprehensively stated and 

 more largely exemplified than by any previous writer ; and the work, having 

 been completed by the publication of " The Emotions and the Will" may now 

 be referred to as incomparably the most complete analytical exposition of the 

 mental phenomena, on the basis of a legitimate Induction, which has yet been 

 produced. 



Many striking applications of the laws of association to the explanation 

 of complex mental phenomena, are also to be found in Mr. Herbert Spencer's 

 "Principles of Psychology." 



