LAWS OF MIND. 501 



us, without the presence of any such cause as excited it 

 at first. Thus, if we have once seen or touched an 

 object, we can afterwards think of the object although 

 it be absent from our sight or from our touch. If we 

 have been joyful or grieved at some event, we can think 

 of, or remember, our past joy or grief, although no 

 new event of a happy or a 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 Juliet, he can afterwards think of the ideal object 

 he has created, without any fresh act of intellectual 

 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 imme- 

 diate succession, then whenever either of these impres- 

 sions or the idea of it recurs, it tends to excite the 

 idea of the other. The third law is, that greater inten- 

 sity 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 : upon which I shall not enlarge in this place, 

 but refer the reader to works professedly psychological, 

 in particular to Mr. Mill's Analysis of the Pheno- 

 mena of the Human Mind, where the principal laws 

 of association, both in themselves and in many of their 

 applications, are copiously exemplified, and with a 

 masterly hand. 



These simple or elementary Laws of Mind have 



