Biographia Literaria
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Chapter V [of XXII]                                                     [To read other chapters, click here.]

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 [24] 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 (vis 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."

[Here ends chapter 5.  To read other chapters of Biographia Literaria, click here.]


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FOOTNOTE  [by Samuel Taylor Coleridge]

[24] I here use the word idea in Mr. Hume's sense on account of its
general currency amongst the English metaphysicians; though against my
own judgment, for I believe that the vague use of this word has been
the cause of much error and more confusion. The word, idea, in its
original sense as used by Pindar, Aristophanes, and in the Gospel of
St. Matthew, represented the visual abstraction of a distant object,
when we see the whole without distinguishing its parts. Plato adopted
it as a technical term, and as the antithesis to eidolon, or sensuous
image; the transient and perishable emblem, or mental word, of the
idea. Ideas themselves he considered as mysterious powers, living,
seminal, formative, and exempt from time. In this sense the word Idea
became the property of the Platonic school; and it seldom occurs in
Aristotle, without some such phrase annexed to it, as according to
Plato, or as Plato says. Our English writers to the end of the reign
of Charles II or somewhat later, employed it either in the original
sense, or Platonically, or in a sense nearly correspondent to our
present use of the substantive, Ideal; always however opposing it,
more or less to image, whether of present or absent objects. The
reader will not be displeased with the following interesting
exemplification from Bishop Jeremy Taylor. "St. Lewis the King sent
Ivo Bishop of Chartres on an embassy, and he told, that he met a grave
and stately matron on the way with a censer of fire in one band, 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,—Locke adopted the term,
but extended its signification to whatever is the immediate object of
the mind's attention or consciousness. 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.

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