and private, which arise from the first, will engage the world to bestow upon it much honour and applause, in the same manner as the evil consequences of vice must make it the object of censure and reproach. Since therefore the child is affected with the words expressing honour and censure, both from the separate influences of these words, and from the application of the phrases of this kind to other subjects of praise and dispraise, he must be affected by the commendations bestowed upon him when he has done well, and by the censures past on him when he has done ill.

"These commendations and censures are also attended with great immediate rewards and punishments, likewise with the hopes and fears relating to another world; and when the moral sense is sufficiently generated, with great secret indeterminate pleasure and pain of this kind; and these associations add a particular force to the honour and shame belonging respectively to virtue and vice. At the same time it is easy to see, that some considerable progress in life is ordinarily required before men come to be deeply and lastingly affected by these things; also, that this kind of honour and shame may, at last, from the superior force of the associated pleasures and pains, absorb, as it were,

all the other kinds. A religious man becomes at last insensible, in a great measure, to every encomium and reproach, excepting such as he apprehends will rest upon him at the last day, from Him whose judgment cannot err."

If a person will take the first volume of the treatise "On Man," and read it carefully over, and whenever he finds the words association, associates, associating, &c., let him replace them with the words memory, remembered, remembrance, connected in his mind, and he will find that the sense of the various passages in which the former class of words are used, will remain as completely the same, when words descriptive of memory are thus employed.

It may be considered as something curious, that Dr. Hartley, who may properly enough be looked upon as the author of this system of association,— a writer who gives such incontestible and signal evidence of his attachment to theory, and of his disposition to turn and twist every thing to square with his favourite doctrine; a man whose genius and acquirements were far above the common order, but who being led away by this ignis fatuus of association, only employed his talents to confound men's minds, and darken knowledge; I say

it is something curious, that he should have been led into the same train of reasoning as is here adduced respecting the identity of association and memory. But this discovery of the tacit abandonment of his own system, slips out from his pen only as it were by accident; for he seems to have been much afraid to enlarge upon the topic. He says, "For the same reason also, the whole powers of the soul may be referred to the memory, when taken in a large sense.' Now, will any of the disciples of the Doctor tell us, in what other sense, either large or circumscribed, the faculty of memory does not account for as much as association ?

What must appear to every one as a great imperfection in this system, is its total want of some characteristic circumstance, some portion of individuality, by which it might be distinguished from other systems, and by which its truth or falsehood, its merits or demerits, might be tried. When you ask an advocate for the doctrine of utility or public expediency, what is the origin of morals? or what is the reason that men give the name of virtue to one set of actions, and that of vice to another? He will tell you, it is because man's nature is so

* Observations on Man, vol. i. p. 395.

constituted, that he finds benefit or pleasure from some actions, and pain or evil from others. If you put the like question to a disciple of Dr. Smith's, he will tell you, that it is by a species of mental sympathy that we applaud virtue and denounce vice. But if you ask a philosopher of the association school, what is the reason that men feel a pleasure in practising virtue, and pain in following a contrary course? he will tell you, with a seriousness and gravity of one who conceives he has mighty things to communicate, that it is because there is some kind of connexion amongst our ideas, but of the real nature or modes of operation of which connexion he does not profess to know more than what is known by every body else. This is the true state of the case. The advocates of association state a simple fact, that there is a connexion amongst our ideas; but that fact appertains to, and forms the ground-work of every other moral system whatever. How association ever came to be considered as something anomalous, something to which its advocates possessed an exclusive right, and on which they could found a theory different from those of other writers, it is impossible to conceive. Association differs from other systems only in the change of a term. It is founded on the same principles, enforc

ed by the same arguments, illustrated by the same facts, and explained in the same language, which appertain to every philosophical view of human

nature.

What a dull and paralyzing effect has the reading of a book, in which the principle of the association of ideas forms the philosophical dramatis persona in the piece. It is hauled in to act all sorts of characters, from the distracted ravings of the most tragic feelings, down throughout all the intermediate stages of character, to the childish drolleries and whimsical fooleries of Punch. There is no way of getting through the book, without violating the rules of politeness, by enjoying a smile at the expense of the system. There is certainly uniformity in it, but it is the uniformity of the desert waste, where death-like monotony and sickening dulness take up their everlasting abode. Considered as a moral system, it is one of the most imperfect. No intellectual satisfaction arises from it. It discovers nothing which is new, and over the old portion of knowledge it throws no additional charms or embellishments. It is by some means considered as a part and parcel of a certain metaphysical and theological system; and by this its reputation is bolstered up, and it still