acts upon the senses: but why should it be modified by it in the absence of B? This modification of the latter part of A by B is not the intermediate cause of the excitement of b, for b, the representative of B, must be excited, at least imperfectly, before it can modify A (B itself being nothing) and the point is how A, or a excites the movement connected with B and that only, not how, supposing this connection between them to be established, the one gradually passes into the other, and ends in it. I think Hartley constantly mistakes tracing the order of palpable ef fects, or overt acts of the mind for explaining the causes of the connection between them, which he hardly ever does with a true metaphysical feeling. Even where he is greatest, he is always the physiologist rather than the metaphysician *.

I have always had the same feeling with res pect to Hartley (still granting his power to the utmost) which is pleasantly expressed in an old author, Roger Bacon, quoted by Sir Kenelm Digby in his

Perhaps a better way to set about discovering the clue to the principle of asso-.

answer to Brown. "Those students" he says,` "who busy themselves much with such notions as "relate wholly to the fantasie, do hardly ever be-"come idoneous for abstracted metaphysical specu"lations; the one having bulky foundation of mat"ter or of the accidents of it to settle upon, (at the "least with one foot :) the other flying continually, " even to a lessening pitch, in the subtil air. And "accordingly, it hath been generally noted, that "the exactest mathematicians, who converse altoge "ther with lines, figures, and other differences of "quantity, have seldom proved eminent in meta"physicks or speculative divinity. Nor again, the "professors of these sciences in the other arts.

Much less can it be expected, that an excellent "physician, whose fancy is always fraught with the "material drugs that he prescribeth his apothecary "to compound his medicines of, and whose hands "are inured to the cutting up, and eyes to the in

spection of anatomized bodies, should easily and "with success, flie his thoughts at so towring a "game, as a pure intellect, a separated and unbo"died soul."-I confess I feel in reading Hartley something in the way in which the Dryads must

*

ciation, setting aside all ideas of extension, contiguity, &c. would be by considering.

I feel my

have done shut up in their old oak trees. sides pressed hard, and bored with points of knotty inferences piled up one upon another without being able ever to recollect myself, or catch a glimpse of the actual world without me. I am somehow wedged in between different rows of material objects, overpowering me by their throng, and from which I have no power to escape, but of which I neither know nor understand any thing. I constantly see objects multiplied upon me, not powers at work, I know no reason why one thing follows another but that something else is conjured up between them, which has as little apparent connection with either as they have with one another ;-he always reasons from the concrete object, not from the abstract or essential properties of things, and in his whole book I do not believe that there is one good definition. It would be a bad way to describe a man's character to say that he had a wise father or a foolish son, and yet this is the way in which Hartley defines ideas by stating what precedes them in the mind, and what comes after them. Thus he defines the will to be "that idea, or state of mind which precedes action," or "a desire, or aversion sufficiently strong to produce action," &c. He gives you the outward

the manner in which the same conscious principle may be supposed to adapt itself to, to combine, and as it were reconcile together the actions of different objects impressed on it at once, and to all of which it is forced to attend at the same time; by which means these several impressions thus compelled into agreement, and a kind of mutual understanding one with another afterwards retain a particular tendency or disposition to unite together, that is to say, the mind when thrown back into the same state by the recurrence of any one of these ideas is of course put into the way of admitting or passing more readily to any other of the same set of ideas than to any other ideas of a different set not so blended and harmonized with it. It seems as if

signs of things in the order in which he conceives them to follow one another, never the demonstration of certain consequences from the known nature of their causes, which alone is true reasoning. Nevertheless, it is not to be forgotten, that he was also a great man. See his Chapter on Memory, &c.

the mind was laid open to all the impressions which had been made upon it at any given time, the moment any one of them recalls a state of feeling habitually in unison with the rest. By touching a certain spring, all obstacles are removed, the doors fly open, and the whole gallery is seen at a single glance. The mind has a capacity to perform any complex action the easier for having performed the same action before. It will consequently have a disposition to perform that action rather than any other, the other circumstances being the same. I imagine that association is to be accounted for on the very same principle as a man's being able to comprehend or take in a mathematical demonstration the better for going over it a number of times, or to recognise any wellknown object, as the figure of a man for instance in the middle of a common, sooner than a stump of a tree, or piece of a rock of twice the size, and of just as remarkable a shape. In like manner, or at least consis