Classic Poem

On the law of Association--Its history traced from Aristotle to Hartley.


There have been men in all ages, who have been impelled as by an
instinct to propose their own nature as a problem, and who devote their
attempts to its solution. The first step was to construct a table of
distinctions, which they seem to have formed on the principle of the
absence or presence of the Will. Our various sensations, perceptions,
and movements were classed as active or passive, or as media partaking
of both. A still finer distinction was soon established between the
voluntary and the spontaneous. In our perceptions we seem to ourselves
merely passive to an external power, whether as a mirror reflecting the
landscape, or as a blank canvass on which some unknown hand paints it.
For it is worthy of notice, that the latter, or the system of Idealism
may be traced to sources equally remote with the former, or Materialism;
and Berkeley can boast an ancestry at least as venerable as Gassendi
or Hobbes. These conjectures, however, concerning the mode in which our
perceptions originated, could not alter the natural difference of Things
and Thoughts. In the former, the cause appeared wholly external,
while in the latter, sometimes our will interfered as the producing or
determining cause, and sometimes our nature seemed to act by a mechanism
of its own, without any conscious effort of the will, or even against
it. Our inward experiences were thus arranged in three separate classes,
the passive sense, or what the School-men call the merely receptive
quality of the mind; the voluntary; and the spontaneous, which holds the
middle place between both. But it is not in human nature to meditate on
any mode of action, without inquiring after the law that governs it;
and in the explanation of the spontaneous movements of our being, the
metaphysician took the lead of the anatomist and natural philosopher. In
Egypt, Palestine, Greece, and India the analysis of the mind had reached
its noon and manhood, while experimental research was still in its dawn
and infancy. For many, very many centuries, it has been difficult to
advance a new truth, or even a new error, in the philosophy of the
intellect or morals. With regard, however, to the laws that direct the
spontaneous movements of thought and the principle of their intellectual
mechanism there exists, it has been asserted, an important exception
most honourable to the moderns, and in the merit of which our own
country claims the largest share. Sir James Mackintosh,--(who, amid the
variety of his talents and attainments, is not of less repute for the
depth and accuracy of his philosophical inquiries than for the
eloquence with which he is said to render their most difficult results
perspicuous, and the driest attractive,)--affirmed in the Lectures,
delivered by him in Lincoln's Inn Hall, that the law of association as
established in the contemporaneity of the original impressions,
formed the basis of all true psychology; and that any ontological or
metaphysical science, not contained in such (that is, an empirical)
psychology, was but a web of abstractions and generalizations. Of this
prolific truth, of this great fundamental law, he declared Hobbes to
have been the original discoverer, while its full application to the
whole intellectual system we owed to Hartley; who stood in the same
relation to Hobbes as Newton to Kepler; the law of association being
that to the mind, which gravitation is to matter.

Of the former clause in this assertion, as it respects the comparative
merits of the ancient metaphysicians, including their commentators, the
School-men, and of the modern and British and French philosophers from
Hobbes to Hume, Hartley, and Condillac, this is not the place to speak.
So wide indeed is the chasm between Sir James Mackintosh's philosophical
creed and mine, that so far from being able to join hands, we could
scarcely make our voices intelligible to each other: and to bridge it
over would require more time, skill, and power than I believe myself
to possess. But the latter clause involves for the greater part a mere
question of fact and history, and the accuracy of the statement is to be
tried by documents rather than reasoning.

First, then, I deny Hobbes's claim in toto: for he had been anticipated
by Des Cartes, whose work De Methodo, preceded Hobbes's De Natura
Humana, by more than a year. But what is of much more importance, Hobbes
builds nothing on the principle which he had announced. He does not
even announce it, as differing in any respect from the general laws of
material motion and impact: nor was it, indeed, possible for him so
to do, compatibly with his system, which was exclusively material and
mechanical. Far otherwise is it with Des Cartes; greatly as he too
in his after writings (and still more egregiously his followers De la
Forge, and others) obscured the truth by their attempts to explain it on
the theory of nervous fluids, and material configurations. But, in his
interesting work, De Methodo, Des Cartes relates the circumstance which
first led him to meditate on this subject, and which since then has been
often noticed and employed as an instance and illustration of the law.
A child who with its eyes bandaged had lost several of his fingers by
amputation, continued to complain for many days successively of pains,
now in this joint and now in that, of the very fingers which had
been cut off. Des Cartes was led by this incident to reflect on the
uncertainty with which we attribute any particular place to any inward
pain or uneasiness, and proceeded after long consideration to establish
it as a general law: that contemporaneous impressions, whether images
or sensations, recall each other mechanically. On this principle, as
a ground work, he built up the whole system of human language, as one
continued process of association. He showed in what sense not only
general terms, but generic images,--under the name of abstract
ideas,--actually existed, and in what consist their nature and power.
As one word may become the general exponent of many, so by association
a simple image may represent a whole class. But in truth Hobbes
himself makes no claims to any discovery, and introduces this law of
association, or (in his own language) discursion of mind, as an
admitted fact, in the solution alone of which, and this by causes purely
physiological, he arrogates any originality. His system is briefly this;
whenever the senses are impinged on by external objects, whether by
the rays of light reflected from them, or by effluxes of their finer
particles, there results a correspondent motion of the innermost and
subtlest organs. This motion constitutes a representation, and there
remains an impression of the same, or a certain disposition to repeat
the same motion. Whenever we feel several objects at the same time, the
impressions that are left, (or in the language of Mr. Hume, the ideas,)
are linked together. Whenever therefore any one of the movements, which
constitute a complex impression, is renewed through the senses, the
others succeed mechanically. It follows of necessity, therefore, that
Hobbes, as well as Hartley and all others who derive association from
the connection and interdependence of the supposed matter, the movements
of which constitute our thoughts, must have reduced all its forms to
the one law of Time. But even the merit of announcing this law with
philosophic precision cannot be fairly conceded to him. For the objects
of any two ideas need not have co-existed in the same sensation in
order to become mutually associable. The same result will follow when
one only of the two ideas has been represented by the senses, and the
other by the memory.

Long however before either Hobbes or Des Cartes the law of association
had been defined, and its important functions set forth by Ludovicus
Vives. Phantasia, it is to be noticed, is employed by Vives to express
the mental power of comprehension, or the active function of the mind;
and imaginatio for the receptivity (via receptiva) of impressions, or
for the passive perception. The power of combination he appropriates
to the former: "quae singula et simpliciter acceperat imaginatio, ea
conjungit et disjungait phantasia." And the law by which the thoughts
are spontaneously presented follows thus: "quae simul sunt a phantasia
comprehensa, si alterutrum occurrat, solet secum alterum representare."
To time therefore he subordinates all the other exciting causes
of association. The soul proceeds "a causa ad effectum, ab hoc ad
instrumentum, a parte ad totum;" thence to the place, from place to
person, and from this to whatever preceded or followed, all as being
parts of a total impression, each of which may recall the other. The
apparent springs "saltus vel transitus etiam longissimos," he explains
by the same thought having been a component part of two or more total
impressions. Thus "ex Scipione venio in cogitationem potentiae Turcicae,
propter victorias ejus de Asia, in qua regnabat Antiochus."

But from Vives I pass at once to the source of his doctrines, and (as
far as we can judge from the remains yet extant of Greek philosophy)
as to the first, so to the fullest and most perfect enunciation of the
associative principle, namely, to the writings of Aristotle; and of
these in particular to the treatises De Anima, and "De Memoria," which
last belongs to the series of essays entitled in the old translations
Parva Naturalia. In as much as later writers have either deviated from,
or added to his doctrines, they appear to me to have introduced either
error or groundless supposition.

In the first place it is to be observed, that Aristotle's positions on
this subject are unmixed with fiction. The wise Stagyrite speaks of no
successive particles propagating motion like billiard balls, as Hobbes;
nor of nervous or animal spirits, where inanimate and irrational solids
are thawed down, and distilled, or filtrated by ascension, into living
and intelligent fluids, that etch and re-etch engravings on the brain,
as the followers of Des Cartes, and the humoral pathologists in general;
nor of an oscillating ether which was to effect the same service for the
nerves of the brain considered as solid fibres, as the animal
spirits perform for them under the notion of hollow tubes, as Hartley
teaches--nor finally, (with yet more recent dreamers) of chemical
compositions by elective affinity, or of an electric light at once the
immediate object and the ultimate organ of inward vision, which rises
to the brain like an Aurora Borealis, and there, disporting in various
shapes,--as the balance of plus and minus, or negative and positive,
is destroyed or re-established,--images out both past and present.
Aristotle delivers a just theory without pretending to an hypothesis;
or in other words a comprehensive survey of the different facts, and
of their relations to each other without supposition, that is, a fact
placed under a number of facts, as their common support and explanation;
though in the majority of instances these hypotheses or suppositions
better deserve the name of upopoiaeseis, or suffictions. He uses indeed
the word kinaeseis, to express what we call representations or ideas,
but he carefully distinguishes them from material motion, designating
the latter always by annexing the words en topo, or kata topon. On the
contrary, in his treatise De Anima, he excludes place and motion from
all the operations of thought, whether representations or volitions, as
attributes utterly and absurdly heterogeneous.

The general law of association, or, more accurately, the common
condition under which all exciting causes act, and in which they may
be generalized, according to Aristotle is this. Ideas by having been
together acquire a power of recalling each other; or every partial
representation awakes the total representation of which it had been
a part. In the practical determination of this common principle to
particular recollections, he admits five agents or occasioning
causes: first, connection in time, whether simultaneous, preceding,
or successive; second, vicinity or connection in space; third,
interdependence or necessary connection, as cause and effect; fourth,
likeness; and fifth, contrast. As an additional solution of the
occasional seeming chasms in the continuity of reproduction he proves,
that movements or ideas possessing one or the other of these five
characters had passed through the mind as intermediate links,
sufficiently clear to recall other parts of the same total impressions
with which they had co-existed, though not vivid enough to excite that
degree of attention which is requisite for distinct recollection, or
as we may aptly express it, after consciousness. In association then
consists the whole mechanism of the reproduction of impressions, in the
Aristotelian Psychology. It is the universal law of the passive fancy
and mechanical memory; that which supplies to all other faculties their
objects, to all thought the elements of its materials.

In consulting the excellent commentary of St. Thomas Aquinas on the
Parva Naturalia of Aristotle, I was struck at once with its close
resemblance to Hume's Essay on Association. The main thoughts were
the same in both, the order of the thoughts was the same, and even the
illustrations differed only by Hume's occasional substitution of more
modern examples. I mentioned the circumstance to several of my literary
acquaintances, who admitted the closeness of the resemblance, and
that it seemed too great to be explained by mere coincidence; but
they thought it improbable that Hume should have held the pages of the
Angelic Doctor worth turning over. But some time after Mr. Payne showed
Sir James Mackintosh some odd volumes of St. Thomas Aquinas, partly
perhaps from having heard that he had in his Lectures passed a high
encomium on this canonized philosopher; but chiefly from the fact, that
the volumes had belonged to Mr. Hume, and had here and there marginal
marks and notes of reference in his own hand writing. Among these
volumes was that which contains the Parva Naturalia, in the old Latin
version, swathed and swaddled in the commentary afore mentioned

It remains then for me, first to state wherein Hartley differs from
Aristotle; then, to exhibit the grounds of my conviction, that
he differed only to err: and next as the result, to show, by what
influences of the choice and judgment the associative power becomes
either memory or fancy; and, in conclusion, to appropriate the remaining
offices of the mind to the reason, and the imagination. With my best
efforts to be as perspicuous as the nature of language will permit
on such a subject, I earnestly solicit the good wishes and friendly
patience of my readers, while I thus go "sounding on my dim and perilous
way."