408 APPENDIX. 



Note top. 166. 



Trace whatever department we will, we find that association is 

 the new world of this century, whose symptoms have been long pre- 

 paring; growing up, like little coral apices, the germinating points 

 of future islands and continents. One early dot of this kind which 

 arose from the ocean of vagueness, was the doctrine of the associa- 

 tion of ideas, seized by the strong common sense of Hobbes, and 

 afterwards methodized and mechanized by the genius of Hartley. 



That the human mind stimulates itself into action in certain lines 

 of ideas, and that there are trains, regiments and bands of thoughts; 

 that pleasures and pains determine the formation of these intellectual 

 cohorts, is a fact in which there is but little novelty; and yet when 

 it is seized, and taken as a stand-point, it leads by these very regi- 

 ments, into new kinds of operation. It gives militariness, and 

 march, and in high cases music to the soul, preparing for conquest 

 under strategical principles; for the discipline of thought, whether 

 discovered as nature's, or commanded by man, has the same results 

 upon science, as the drill of armies upon material warfare. We 

 therefore lay it down, that the doctrine of the association of ideas, 

 when set in motion, invades every subject with fresh force, and with 

 the new element of breadth of attack. This is not indeed a depart- 

 ment important in practice : we cite it rather from its smallness, as 

 showing that the associative air has permeated even into the minute 

 sphere of individual thought. 



One step larger, and we come to the material sciences : and what 

 has been the process here ? Every victory has been gained by look- 

 ing at subjects not in themselves alone, but as connected with their 

 neighbors. How barren each thing is while it stands upon its own 

 individuality; how its properties one by one die down, as we cut it 

 off from the influences of the surrounding natures ! The association 

 of single things with each other in a common knowledge, is what 

 brings them under the grasp of a particular science; which is no 

 sooner constituted, than we feel that it too is unfruitful in itself; 

 and that it begins to yearn, like a young maiden, with strange de- 

 sires for conjunction with some other whole science. The two to- 

 gether are more than twice either; they are three at the very first; 



