PHILOSOPHY, MENTAL. 



riousness of his natural attributes upon 

 his moral ones, that is, upon moral 

 rectitude. By these means we shall learn 

 to be merciful, holy, and perfect, be- 

 cause God is so ; and to love mercy, holi- 

 ness, and perfection, wherever we see 

 them. 



99. Hence it appears that all the plea- 

 sures and pains of our nature, those of 

 sensation, imagination, ambition, self-in- 

 terest, sympathy, and theopathy, as far as 

 they are consistent with each other, with 

 the constitution of our minds, and with 

 the course of the world, produce in us a 

 moral sense, and lead to the love and ap- 

 probation of virtue, and to the fear and 

 abhorrence of vice. This moral sense, 

 therefore, carries its own authority with 

 it, inasmuch as it is the sum total of all 

 the rest, and the ultimate result from 

 them. When it has advanced to consi- 

 derable perfection, a person may be made 

 to love and hate, merely because he 

 ought ; that is, the pleasures of moral 

 beauty and rectitude, and the pains of 

 moral deformity and unfitness, may be 

 transferred and made to coalesce almost 

 instantaneously. 



IV. OF THE MOTIVE POWEH. 



100. In our general view of the pri- 

 mary mental faculties, we stated as an 

 obvious fact, that * without any external 

 excitement of the nerves by which mus- 

 cular motion is produced, the mind can 

 produce such motion ; in other words, 

 that state of the motory nerves by which 

 muscular motion is effected, can be pro- 

 duced by the mind.' To account for 

 this fact, we infer that the mind pos- 

 sesses a power or capacity of influencing 

 the motory nerves so as to produce mus- 

 cular motion, which may be called the 

 motive power. Even supposing that the 

 sensorial changes by which muscular mo- 

 tion is followed, whatever they may be, 

 are of the same nature by external im- 

 pressions ; and admitting, what appears 

 certain, that the associative power is the 

 cause that ideas, and sometimes that sen- 

 sations, produce motory changes of the 

 sensorium, still we must infer the exist- 

 ence of a motive power ; otherwise ideas 

 and sensations could not be the exciting 

 cause of muscular motion : in other 

 words, whatever be the mental causes of 

 muscular motion, that motion, if it begin 

 from the mind, implies that the mind 

 possesses the power of which we speak, 

 separate from the cause of sensations, of 

 ideas, and of the connections among 1 them. 



Indeed it appears to be generally admit- 

 ted, but is usually referred to the head of 

 will. 



101. A large class of the phenomena 

 of muscular motion are explicable by the 

 principle of association ; and, as far as we 

 perceive, they can be explained only by 

 its laws. There are four classes of mus- 

 cular motion ; 1. Where it is produced 

 by some foreign excitement of the mus- 

 cular system, without the intervention of 

 the mind, in which case it may be called 

 involuntary ; 2. Where it is produced by 

 sensation without volition, or any other 

 associated sensation, idea, or motion, hav- 

 ing been concerned in the connection 

 between sensation and motion, in which 

 case it is termed automatic in the Hart- 

 leyan nomenclature ; 3. Where it follows 

 that state of mind which we term will, 

 directly, and without our perceiving the 

 intervention of another idea, or of any 

 sensation or motion, it may be termed 

 voluntary in the highest sense of this 

 word; 4. Where the motion has been 

 voluntary, but is become automatic by 

 the influence of the associative power, it is 

 termed by Hartley secondarily automa- 

 tic. With the first of this class of motions, 

 Mental Philosophy has little or nothing 

 to do ; as to the second, till more is 

 known respecting the nature of those 

 changes which take place in the senso- 

 rium, it can do little more than state the 

 fact. The third and fourth afford farther 

 illustrations of the doctrine of association, 

 and we shall select from the Mental Prin- 

 cipia such statements as will suffice to 

 explain the progress of muscular motion 

 from automatic to voluntary, and from 

 voluntary to secondarily automatic. 



102. The most simple instance of this 

 progress is in the action of grasping. 

 The fingers of young children bend upon 

 almost every impression which is made 

 on the palm of the hand, thus perform- 

 ing the action of grasping in the original 

 automatic manner. After a sufficientre- 

 petition of the motions which concur in 

 this action, the sensorial changes preced- 

 ing them are strongly associated with dif- 

 ferent ideas, the most common of which 

 probably are, those excited by the sight 

 of a favourite plaything or other object 

 which the child is used to grasp and hold 

 in his hand. He ought therefore, accord- 

 ing to the doctrine of association, to per- 

 form and repeat the action of grasping, 

 upon having such a play-thing, &c. pre- 

 sented to his sight : and it is a known 

 fact that children do so. By pursuing 

 the same method of reasoning 1 , we may 



