34 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 



on all ordinary occasions on which its exercise could be looked for. 

 Indulgence of lower appetite, e. g., may have become so habitual that 

 all the claims of moral law may practically have ceased to make their 

 voice heard in the presence of immediate empirical instigation. But 

 this is not the annihilation of motive ; it is the usurpation by one 

 motive of the sceptre and dominion that rightfully belong to another. 

 The attempt to find some single universal principle, under which 

 all the various manifestations of habit may be brought, brings us face 

 to face with the question so freqently discussed as to the relation in 

 which the law of habit stands to the association of ideas. The views 

 which have hitherto genex-ally prevailed divide into two classes the 

 diametrical opposites of one another. One class of writers contend 

 that the law of habit is an ultimate original principle of our nature, 

 incapable of analysis into simpler elementary constituents, or of sub- 

 sumption under any wider law from which it may be deduced, or of 

 which it may be regarded as a special case, and they resolve the 

 association of ideas into the principle of habit. Of Dr. Reid it can- 

 not, as a general thing, be said, as has been said of Mr. James Mill 

 by one of his connotators, that his desire to avoid unnecessary multi- 

 plication of fundamental laws in exposition or explanation of mental 

 phenomena has often led him into the error of resolving into different 

 manifestations of the same law phenomena which are governed by 

 laws really and fundamentally distinct. On the contrary, in general, 

 there seems to be an absence of all such desire on the part of Dr. 

 Reid. Occam's "razor" is a tool which he seldom uses. With a 

 little more careful scrutiny he might easily have seen that principles 

 which he regards as ultimate and original ai'e not so, but are capable 

 of resolution into, or at least of subsumption under, simpler and 

 wider laws. However, the desire mentioned has certainly influenced 

 Dr. Reid in his speculations on the point with which we are now 

 concerned. He says : "I believe that the original principles of the 

 mind of which we can give no account but that such is our constitu- 

 tion are more in number than is commonly thought. But we ought 

 not to multiply them without necessity. That trains of thinking 

 which by frequent repetition have become familiar, should spontane- 

 ously offer themselves to our fancy seems to requii-e no other original 

 principle but the power of habit." And this view is not without its 

 adherents at the present day, for Dr. Noah Porter, in his elaborate 

 work entitled "The Human Intellect," contends that "the law of 



