ASSOCIATION. 597 



to have as extraordinary effects as in the natural, and to show itself in 

 as many and as various forms. Its effects are everywhere conspicuous ; 

 but as to its causes, they are mostly unknown, and must be resolved 

 into original qualities of human nature, which I pretend not to 



explain." * 



Hume did not, however, any more than Hobbes, follow 

 out the effects of which he speaks, and the task of populariz- 

 ing the notion of association and making an effective school 

 based on association of ideas alone was reserved for Hart- 

 lejt and James Mill.| These authors traced minutely the 

 presence of association in all the cardinal notions and op- 

 erations of the mind. The several ' faculties ' of the Mind 

 were dispossessed ; the one principle of association between 

 ideas did all their work. As Priestley says : 



" Nothing is requisite to make any man whatever he is, but a 

 sentient principle with this single law. . . . Not only all our intel- 

 lectual pleasures and pains but all the phenomena of memory, imagina- 

 tion, volition, reasoning and every other mental affection and operation, 

 are but different modes or cases of the association of ideas." § 



An eminent French psychologist, M. Ribot, repeats 

 Hume's comparison of the law of association with that of 

 gravitation, and goes on to say : 



" It is remarkable that this discovery was made so late. Nothing is 

 simpler, apparently, than to notice that this law of association is the 

 truly fundamental, irreducible phenomenon of our mental life ; that it 

 is at the bottom of all our acts ; that it permits of no exception ; that 

 neither dream, re very, mystic ecstasy, nor the most abstract reasoning 

 can exist without it ; that its suppression would be equivalent to that of 

 thought itself. Nevei'theless no ancient author understood it, for one 

 cannot seriously maintain that a few scattered lines in Aristotle and 

 the Stoics constitute a theory and clear view of the subject. It is to 

 Hobbes, Hume, and Hartley that we must attribute the origin of these 

 studies on the connection of our ideas. The discovery of the ultimate 

 law of our psychologic acts has this, then, in common with many other 

 discoveries : it earae late and seems so simple that it may justly astonish 

 us. 



"Perhaps it is not superfluous to ask in what this manner of ex- 

 planation is superior to the current theory of Faculties. | The most 



" Treatise of Human Nature, part i. § iv. 



f Observations ou Man (London, 1749) 



X Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829). 



§ Hartley's Theory, 2d ed. (1790) p. xxvii. 



|| [Current, that is, in France. — W. J.] 



