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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 Hobbs or Des Cartes the law of association had been defined, and its important 5 functions set forth by Melanchthon, Ammerbach, and Ludovicus Vives; more especially by the last. 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 (vis receptiva) of impres- 10 sions, or for the passive perception. The power of combination he appropriates to the former: "quæ singula et simpliciter acceperat imaginatio, ea conjungit et disjungit phantasia." And the law by which the thoughts are spontaneously presented follows thus; "quæ simul sunt a phan- 15 tasia comprehensa, si alterutrum occurrat, solet secum alterum repræsentare." 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 20 and he told, that he met a grave and stately matron on the way with a censer of fire in one hand, and a vessel of water in the other; and observing her to have a melancholy, religious, and phantastic deportment and look, he asked her what those symbols meant, and what she meant to do with her fire and water; she answered, my purpose is with the fire to burn paradise, and with my water to quench the flames of hell, that men may serve God purely for the love of God. But we rarely meet with such spirits which love virtue so metaphysically as to abstract her from all sensible compositions, and love the purity of the idea." Des Cartes having introduced into his philosophy the fanciful hypothesis of material ideas, or certain configurations of the brain, which were as so many moulds to the influxes of the external world; Mr. Locke adopted the term, but extended its signification to whatever is the immediate object of the mind's attention or consciousness. Mr. Hume, distinguishing those representations which are accompanied with a sense of a present object, from those reproduced by the mind itself, designated the former by impressions, and confined the

word idea to the latter.

from this to whatever preceded or followed, all as being parts of a total impression, each of which may recal the other. The apparent springs "Saltus vel transitus etiam longissimos," he explains by the same thought having been a component 5 part of two or more total impressions. Thus "ex Scipione venio in cogitationem potentiæ Turcicæ, propter victorias ejus in eâ parte Asiæ 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 10 Greek philosophy) as to the first, so to the fullest and most perfect enunciation of the associative principle, viz. to the writings of Aristotle; and of these in particular to the books "De Anima," "De Memoria," and that which is 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.

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In the first place it is to be observed, that Aristotle's positions on this subject are unmixed with fiction. The 20 wise Stagyrite speaks of no successive particles propagating motion like billiard balls, (as Hobbs); 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 25 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)30 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 35 minus, or negative and positive, is destroyed or re-established)

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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, i.e. a fact placed under a number of facts, as their common support 5 and explanation; though in the majority of instances these hypotheses or suppositions better deserve the name of ὑποποιήσεις, or sufictions. He uses indeed the word κινήσεις, to express what we call representations or ideas, but he carefully distinguishes them from material motion, desig- 10 nating the latter always by annexing the words èv tótų, or KaTà TÓTTOV. 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.

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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 20 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 : Ist, connection in time, whether simultaneous, preceding, or successive; 2nd, vicinity or connection in space; 3rd, 25 interdependence or necessary connection, as cause and effect; 4th, likeness; and 5th, 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 30 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 asso- 35

ciation 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 5 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 10 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 ex15 plained 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, of the King's mews, shewed Sir James Mackintosh some odd volumes of St. Thomas Aquinas, partly perhaps from having 20 heard that Sir James (then Mr.) Mackintosh 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. 25 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 30 conviction, that he differed only to err; and next as the result, to shew, by what influences of the choice and judgement 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 35 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 5 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, Maasse, &c., as outraging the very axioms of 10 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 15 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, 20 and Plato by his musical symbols, and both by geometric discipline, aimed at, as the first рожαídevμa 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 25 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 30

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