Biographia Literaria

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CHAPTER V

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."

CHAPTER VI

That Hartley's system, as far as it differs from that of Aristotle, is
neither tenable in theory, nor founded in facts.

Of Hartley's hypothetical vibrations in his hypothetical oscillating
ether of the nerves, which is the first and most obvious distinction
between his system and that of Aristotle, I shall say little. This,
with all other similar attempts to render that an object of the sight
which has no relation to sight, has been already sufficiently exposed
by the younger Reimarus, Maasz, and others, as outraging the very
axioms of mechanics in a scheme, the merit of which consists in its
being mechanical. Whether any other philosophy be possible, but the
mechanical; and again, whether the mechanical system can have any
claim to be called philosophy; are questions for another place. It is,
however, certain, that as long as we deny the former, and affirm the
latter, we must bewilder ourselves, whenever we would pierce into the
adyta of causation; and all that laborious conjecture can do, is to
fill up the gaps of fancy. Under that despotism of the eye (the
emancipation from which Pythagoras by his numeral, and Plato by his
musical, symbols, and both by geometric discipline, aimed at, as the
first propaideuma of the mind)--under this strong sensuous influence,
we are restless because invisible things are not the objects of
vision; and metaphysical systems, for the most part, become popular,
not for their truth, but in proportion as they attribute to causes a
susceptibility of being seen, if only our visual organs were
sufficiently powerful.

From a hundred possible confutations let one suffice. According to
this system the idea or vibration a from the external object A becomes
associable with the idea or vibration m from the external object M,
because the oscillation a propagated itself so as to re-produce the
oscillation m. But the original impression from M was essentially
different from the impression A: unless therefore different causes may
produce the same effect, the vibration a could never produce the
vibration m: and this therefore could never be the means, by which a
and m are associated. To understand this, the attentive reader need
only be reminded, that the ideas are themselves, in Hartley's system,
nothing more than their appropriate configurative vibrations. It is a
mere delusion of the fancy to conceive the pre-existence of the ideas,
in any chain of association, as so many differently coloured billiard-
balls in contact, so that when an object, the billiard-stick, strikes
the first or white ball, the same motion propagates itself through the
red, green, blue and black, and sets the whole in motion. No! we must
suppose the very same force, which constitutes the white ball, to
constitute the red or black; or the idea of a circle to constitute the
idea of a triangle; which is impossible.

But it may be said, that by the sensations from the objects A and M,
the nerves have acquired a disposition to the vibrations a and m, and
therefore a need only be repeated in order to re-produce m. Now we
will grant, for a moment, the possibility of such a disposition in a
material nerve, which yet seems scarcely less absurd than to say, that
a weather-cock had acquired a habit of turning to the east, from the
wind having been so long in that quarter: for if it be replied, that
we must take in the circumstance of life, what then becomes of the
mechanical philosophy? And what is the nerve, but the flint which the
wag placed in the pot as the first ingredient of his stone broth,
requiring only salt, turnips, and mutton, for the remainder! But if we
waive this, and pre-suppose the actual existence of such a
disposition; two cases are possible. Either, every idea has its own
nerve and correspondent oscillation, or this is not the case. If the
latter be the truth, we should gain nothing by these dispositions; for
then, every nerve having several dispositions, when the motion of any
other nerve is propagated into it, there will be no ground or cause
present, why exactly the oscillation m should arise, rather than any
other to which it was equally pre-disposed. But if we take the former,
and let every idea have a nerve of its own, then every nerve must be
capable of propagating its motion into many other nerves; and again,
there is no reason assignable, why the vibration m should arise,
rather than any other ad libitum.

It is fashionable to smile at Hartley's vibrations and vibratiuncles;
and his work has been re-edited by Priestley, with the omission of the
material hypothesis. But Hartley was too great a man, too coherent a
thinker, for this to have been done, either consistently or to any
wise purpose. For all other parts of his system, as far as they are
peculiar to that system, once removed from their mechanical basis, not
only lose their main support, but the very motive which led to their
adoption. Thus the principle of contemporaneity, which Aristotle had
made the common condition of all the laws of association, Hartley was
constrained to represent as being itself the sole law. For to what law
can the action of material atoms be subject, but that of proximity in
place? And to what law can their motions be subjected but that of
time? Again, from this results inevitably, that the will, the reason,
the judgment, and the understanding, instead of being the determining
causes of association, must needs be represented as its creatures, and
among its mechanical effects. Conceive, for instance, a broad stream,
winding through a mountainous country with an indefinite number of
currents, varying and running into each other according as the gusts
chance to blow from the opening of the mountains. The temporary union
of several currents in one, so as to form the main current of the
moment, would present an accurate image of Hartley's theory of the
will.

Had this been really the case, the consequence would have been, that
our whole life would be divided between the despotism of outward
impressions, and that of senseless and passive memory. Take his law in
its highest abstraction and most philosophical form, namely, that
every partial representation recalls the total representation of which
it was a part; and the law becomes nugatory, were it only for its
universality. In practice it would indeed be mere lawlessness.
Consider, how immense must be the sphere of a total impression from
the top of St. Paul's church; and how rapid and continuous the series
of such total impressions. If, therefore, we suppose the absence of
all interference of the will, reason, and judgment, one or other of
two consequences must result. Either the ideas, or reliques of such
impression, will exactly imitate the order of the impression itself,
which would be absolute delirium: or any one part of that impression
might recall any other part, and--(as from the law of continuity,
there must exist in every total impression, some one or more parts,
which are components of some other following total impression, and so
on ad infinitum)--any part of any impression might recall any part of
any other, without a cause present to determine what it should be. For
to bring in the will, or reason, as causes of their own cause, that
is, as at once causes and effects, can satisfy those only who, in
their pretended evidences of a God, having first demanded
organization, as the sole cause and ground of intellect, will then
coolly demand the pre-existence of intellect, as the cause and ground-
work of organization. There is in truth but one state to which this
theory applies at all, namely, that of complete light-headedness; and
even to this it applies but partially, because the will and reason are
perhaps never wholly suspended.

A case of this kind occurred in a Roman Catholic town in Germany a
year or two before my arrival at Goettingen, and had not then ceased
to be a frequent subject of conversation. A young woman of four or
five and twenty, who could neither read, nor write, was seized with a
nervous fever; during which, according to the asseverations of all the
priests and monks of the neighbourhood, she became possessed, and, as
it appeared, by a very learned devil. She continued incessantly
talking Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, in very pompous tones and with most
distinct enunciation. This possession was rendered more probable by
the known fact that she was or had been a heretic. Voltaire humorously
advises the devil to decline all acquaintance with medical men; and it
would have been more to his reputation, if he had taken this advice in
the present instance. The case had attracted the particular attention
of a young physician, and by his statement many eminent physiologists
and psychologists visited the town, and cross-examined the case on the
spot. Sheets full of her ravings were taken down from her own mouth,
and were found to consist of sentences, coherent and intelligible each
for itself, but with little or no connection with each other. Of the
Hebrew, a small portion only could be traced to the Bible; the
remainder seemed to be in the Rabbinical dialect. All trick or
conspiracy was out of the question. Not only had the young woman ever
been a harmless, simple creature; but she was evidently labouring
under a nervous fever. In the town, in which she had been resident for
many years as a servant in different families, no solution presented
itself. The young physician, however, determined to trace her past
life step by step; for the patient herself was incapable of returning
a rational answer. He at length succeeded in discovering the place,
where her parents had lived: travelled thither, found them dead, but
an uncle surviving; and from him learned, that the patient had been
charitably taken by an old Protestant pastor at nine years old, and
had remained with him some years, even till the old man's death. Of
this pastor the uncle knew nothing, but that he was a very good man.
With great difficulty, and after much search, our young medical
philosopher discovered a niece of the pastor's, who had lived with him
as his house-keeper, and had inherited his effects. She remembered the
girl; related, that her venerable uncle had been too indulgent, and
could not bear to hear the girl scolded; that she was willing to have
kept her, but that, after her patron's death, the girl herself refused
to stay. Anxious inquiries were then, of course, made concerning the
pastor's habits; and the solution of the phenomenon was soon obtained.
For it appeared, that it had been the old man's custom, for years, to
walk up and down a passage of his house into which the kitchen door
opened, and to read to himself with a loud voice, out of his favourite
books. A considerable number of these were still in the niece's
possession. She added, that he was a very learned man and a great
Hebraist. Among the books were found a collection of Rabbinical
writings, together with several of the Greek and Latin Fathers; and
the physician succeeded in identifying so many passages with those
taken down at the young woman's bedside, that no doubt could remain in
any rational mind concerning the true origin of the impressions made
on her nervous system.

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