108 HUME iv 



ideas are connected in my experience with the 

 impression, or the idea, of a horse and with one 

 another, by the relations of contiguity and suc- 

 cession. No great attention to what passes in the 

 mind is needful to prove that our trains of thought 

 are neither to be arrested, nor even permanently 

 controlled, by our desires or emotions. Neverthe- 

 less they are largely influenced by them. In the 

 presence of a strong desire, or emotion, the stream 

 of thought no longer flows on in a straight course, 

 but seems, as it were, to eddy round the idea of 

 that which is the object of the emotion. Every 

 one who has " eaten his bread in sorrow " knows 

 how strangely the current of ideas whirls about 

 the conception of the object of regret or remorse 

 as a centre; every now and then, indeed, breaking 

 away into the new tracts suggested by passing 

 associations, but still returning to the central 

 thought. Few can have been so happy as to have 

 escaped the social bore, whose pet notion is certain 

 to crop up whatever topic is started; while the 

 fixed idea of the monomaniac is but the extreme 

 form of the same phenomenon. 



And as, on the one hand, it is so hard to drive 

 away the thought we would fain be rid of; so, 

 upon the other, the pleasant imaginations which 

 we would so gladly retain are, sooner or later, 

 jostled away by the crowd of claimants for birth 

 into the world of consciousness, which hover as a 

 sort of psychical possibilities or inverse ghosts, 



