LAWS OF MIND. 



I do not scruple to affirm that it is in 

 a considerably more ."dvanced state 

 than the porticm of physiology which 

 corresponds to it ; and to discard the 

 former for the latter appears to me 

 an infringement of the true canons 

 of inductive philosophy, which nmst 

 produce, and which does produce, erro- 

 neous conclusions in some very im- 

 portant departments of the science of 

 human nature. 



§ 3. The subject, then, of Psycho- 

 logy is the uniformities of succession, 

 the laws, whether ultimate or deri- 

 vative, according to which one mental 

 state succeeds another — is caused by, 

 or at least is caused to follow, another. 

 Of these laws, some are general, others 

 more special. The following are ex- 

 amples of the most general laws. 



First, Whenever any state of con- 

 sciousness has once been excited in 

 us, no matter by what cause, an in- 

 ferior degree of the same state of con- 

 sciousnessj a state of consciousness 

 resembling the former, but inferior in 

 intensity, is capable of being repro- 

 duced in 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 though 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, 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 Indo- 

 lence, a Una, or a Hamlet, 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 impres- 

 sion has its idea. 



Stfcondly, These ideas, or secondary 

 mental states, are excited by our im- 

 pressions, or by other ideas, according 

 to certain laws which are called Laws 

 of Association. Of these laws the 

 ^st is, that simiUu: ideas tend to ex* 



557 



cite one another. The second is, that 

 when tw'o impressions have been fre- 

 quently experienced (or even thought 

 of), either sinmltaneously or in imme- 

 diate 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 ren- 

 dering 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 particular to Mr. 

 James Mill's Analysis of the Pheno- 

 mena of the Human Mind, where the 

 principal laws of association, along 

 with many of their applications, are 

 copiously exemplified, and with a mas- 

 terly hand.* 



These simple or elementary Laws 

 of Mind have been ascertained by the 

 ordinary methods of experimental in- 

 quiry ; nor could they have been as- 

 certained in any other manner. But 

 a certain number of elementary laws 

 having thus been obtained, it is a fair 

 subject of scientific inquiry how far 

 those laws can be made to go in ex- 

 plaining the actual phenomena. It is 

 obvious that complex laws of thought 

 and feeling not only may, but must 

 be generated from these simple laws. 



* When this chapter was written. Pro- 

 fessor Bain had not yet published even the 

 first part ("The Senses and the Intellect") 

 of his profotind 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 incom- 

 parably the most complete analytical ex- 

 position of the mental phenomena, on the 

 basis of a legitimate induction, which has 

 yet been produced. More recently still, 

 Mr. Ba n h;is joined with me in api'endlng 

 to a new edition of the " Analysis " notes 

 intended to bring up the analytic science 

 of Mind to its latest improvements. 



Many striking app ications of the laws of 

 association to the exiilanation of complex 

 mental phenomena are also to be found in 

 Mr. Herbert 8penctr'§ "Principle* «f Psy- 

 chology." 



