40 



DR. LUDWIG VON GERDTELL, ON 



he already feels it, as if it had taken place, even though it may 

 possibly not take place at all. 



The dog places the once experimentally acquired rule that 

 tlie same cause has always the same effect in the service of his 

 practical policy. When he learnt to " beg " his master always 

 rewarded the completion of his performance by a dainty morsel. 

 The dog came to connect in his n:iemory the two ideas : " beg " 

 — dainty morsel. After a time he comes to " beg " without being 

 told, when he sees the morsel ready. The dog satisfies the 

 condition — that of begging — and expects on the round of 

 experience the consequence thereof — the reception of the 

 desired morsel. 



The eminent English philosoplier, David Hume, justly 

 maintains, therefore, in his penetrating and epochal work, 

 A Treatise on Human Nature, that the brute beast derives 

 a fact directly from that which has acted upon its senses, and 

 that this deduction rests entirely (?) upon past experience, since 

 the beast expects the same consequences to follow the present 

 happening which it has seen always to result from, previous 

 similar happenings. 



Now let us advance a further step and inquire what im- 

 pression the primitive human being receives into his conscious- 

 ness from the fact of Natural Law. 



Even the smallest child, slowly awakening into intelligence, 

 is able to form an impression of the regularity of consecutive 

 action in two related events. It experienced hunger and at 

 first simply cried in sheer discomfort. This was always followed 

 by the appearance of the mother with the bottle. It soon 

 notes the connection of the two related occurrences, and for the 

 future it uses its voice to summon mother and the bottle. 



A child of about a year old accidentally burns its finger on 

 one of the grate-bars. It connects this thereafter with the 

 sight of a grate-bar, which by mechanical instinct calls up 

 the idea of heat, and excites fear and reluctance to touch 

 the bar. 



Here we have the first psychological root of the principle of 

 causation in the fact of the association of ideas. 



(a) We understand by " association of ideas " the involun- 

 tary and instinctive joining up of sensations and 

 conceptions in the same consciousness : each observa- 

 tion showing experimentally the effort to call back to 

 consciousness those mental images that have previ- 

 ously been connected either by space or time with the 

 observation. 



