_simple suggestion_, which are usually referred to a principle of
association in our ideas.
FOOTNOTES:
[135] Traite des Sensations, Part I. Chap. vii. Sect. 2.
[136] Ovid. Metamorph. Lib. XV. v. 234-6, and 252-8.
[137] Mart. Scrib. c. xii.
LECTURE XXXIV.
CLASSIFICATION OF THE INTERNAL AFFECTIONS OF MIND, CONTINUED,--ON
SIMPLE SUGGESTION,--ADVANTAGES RESULTING FROM THE PRINCIPLE OF
SUGGESTION,--ON MR HUME'S CLASSIFICATION OF THE CAUSES OF ASSOCIATE
FEELINGS.
Gentlemen, my general arrangement of the various phenomena, or states
of the mind, is, I trust, now sufficiently familiar to you. We know the
mind only in the succession of these states, as they vary, from moment
to moment; and you have learned to class them, as, in the first place,
External or Internal Affections, according as the mental changes of
state that are induced, have arisen immediately from the presence of
external objects, or from some preceding state of the mind itself,--and
the latter of these classes, you have learned also to subdivide into
its two distinct orders of _Intellectual States of the Mind_ and
_Emotions_. Thus far we have proceeded, I trust, without much risk of
misconception.
In my last Lecture, I proceeded to consider the former of these orders,
and arranged all the variety of our Intellectual States of Mind
under two generic capacities,--those of _Simple_ and of _Relative_
suggestion. Intellectually, we conceive or we judge; our _past_
feelings, in _Simple Suggestion_, of image after image, arise again,
in colours more or less faint, without any known cause exterior to
the mind. By our capacity of the other species of Suggestion, we are
impressed with feelings of a different order, that arise when two or
more objects are contemplated together,--feelings of their agreement,
proportion, or some one or other of the variety of their relations. Of
these two orders of feelings, and of these alone, consists the whole
varied tissue of our trains of thought. All the intellectual powers, of
which writers on this branch of science speak, are, as we shall find,
only modes of these two, as they exist simply, or as they exist in
combination with some desire more or less permanent,--with the desire
of prosecuting a continued inquiry, for example, or of evolving its
results to others,--as in the long series of our ratiocination; or of
framing some splendid succession of images and incidents, as in the
magic pictures of poetry and romance. The simplification may, perhaps,
at present appear to you excessive; but I flatter myself, that after
the two generic capacities themselves shall have been fully considered
by us, it will not appear to you more than is absolutely necessary for
accuracy of analysis and arrangement.
SIMPLE SUGGESTION.
The intellectual phenomena which we are, in the first place, to
consider, then, are those of Simple Suggestion, which are usually
classed under the general term of the _Association of Ideas_,--a term
employed to denote that tendency of the mind, by which feelings,
that were formerly excited by an external cause, arise afterwards,
in regular successions to each other, as it were spontaneously, or
at least without the immediate presence of any known external cause.
The limitation of the term, however, to those states of mind, which
are exclusively denominated ideas, has, I conceive, tended greatly to
obscure the subject, or at least to deprive us of the aid which we
might have received from it in the analysis of many of the most complex
phenomena. The influence of the associating principle itself extends,
not to ideas only, but to every species of affection of which the mind
is susceptible. Our internal joys, sorrows, and all the variety of our
emotions, are capable of being revived in a certain degree by the mere
influence of this principle, and of blending with the ideas or other
feelings which awakened them, in the same manner as our conceptions of
external things. These last, however, it must be admitted, present the
most striking and obvious examples of the influence of the principle,
and are, therefore, the fittest for illustrating it. The faint and
shadowy elements of past emotions, as mingling in any present feeling,
it may not be easy to distinguish; but our remembrances of things
without are clear and definite, and are easily recognized by us as
images of the past. We have seen, in the history of our senses, by
what admirable means Nature has provided for communicating to man
those first rude elements of knowledge, which are afterwards to be the
materials of his sublimest speculations,--and with what still more
admirable goodness she has ministered to his pleasure in these primary
elements of thought, and in the very provision which she has formed
for the subsistence of his animal frame,--making the organs by which
he becomes acquainted with the properties of external things, not the
fountain of knowledge only, but an ever-mingling source of enjoyment
and instruction.
It is through the medium of perception, as we have seen,--that is
to say, through the medium of those _sensitive capacities_ already
so fully considered by us,--that we acquire our knowledge of the
properties of external things. But if our knowledge of these properties
were limited to the moment of perception, and were extinguished forever
with the fading sensation from which it sprang, the acquisition of this
fugitive knowledge would be of little value. We should still, indeed,
be sensible of the momentary pleasure or pain; but all experience of
the past, and all that confidence in the regular successions of future
events, which flows from experience of the past, would of course, be
excluded by universal and instant forgetfulness. In such circumstances,
if the common wants of our animal nature remained, it is evident, that
even life itself, in its worst and most miserable state, could not be
supported; since, though oppressed with thirst and hunger, and within
reach of the most delicious fruits and the most plentiful spring-water,
we should still suffer without any knowledge of the means by which the
suffering could be remedied. Even if, by some provision of Nature, our
bodily constitution had been so framed, as to require no supply of
subsistence, or if, instinctively and without reflection, we had been
led on the first impulse of appetite, to repair our daily waste, and to
shelter ourselves from the various causes of physical injury to which
we are exposed, though our animal life might then have continued to be
extended to as long a period as at present, still, if but a succession
of momentary sensations, it would have been one of the lowest forms
of mere animal life. It is only as capable of looking before and
behind,--that is to say, as capable of those spontaneous suggestions
of thought which constitute _remembrance_ and _foresight_,--that we
rise to the dignity of intellectual being, and that man can be said
to be the image of that Purest of Intellects, who looks backward and
forward, in a single glance, not on a few years only, but on all the
ages of eternity. “Deum te scito esse,” says Cicero, in allusion to
these powers,--“Deum te scito esse, siquidem Deus est, qui viget, qui
sentit,--qui meminit, qui prævidet, qui tam regit et moderatur et movet
id corpus, cui præpositus est, quam hunc mundum princeps ille Deus.”
“Were it not so, the Soul, all dead and lost,
As the fix'd stream beneath the impassive frost,[138]
Form'd for no end, and impotent to please,
Would lie inactive on the couch of ease;
And, heedless of proud fame's immortal lay,
Sleep all her dull divinity away.”[139]
Without any remembrance of pleasures formerly enjoyed, or of sorrows
long past and long endured,--looking on the persons and scenes
which had surrounded us from the first moment of our birth, as if
they were objects altogether unknown to us,--incapable even of as
much reasoning as still gleams through the dreadful stupor of the
maniac,--or of conveying even that faint expression of thought with
which the rudest savages, in the rudest language, are still able to
hold some communication of their passions or designs;--such, but for
that capacity which we are considering, would have been the deplorable
picture of the whole human race. What is now revered by us as the
most generous and heroic virtue, or the most profound and penetrating
genius, would have been nothing more than this wretchedness and
imbecility. It is _the suggesting principle_, the reviver of thoughts
and feelings which have passed away, that gives value to all our other
powers and susceptibilities, intellectual and moral--not indeed, by
producing them, for, though unevolved, they would still, as latent
capacities, be a part of the original constitution of our spiritual
nature,--but by rousing them into action, and furnishing them with
those accumulating and inexhaustible materials, which are to be the
elements of future thought and the objects of future emotion. Every
talent by which we excel, and every vivid feeling which animates
us, derive their energy from the suggestions of this ever-active
principle. We love and hate,--we desire and fear,--we use means for
obtaining good, and avoiding evil,--because we remember the objects and
occurrences which we have formerly observed, and because the future, in
the similarity of the successions which it presents, appears to us only
a prolongation of the past.
In conferring on us the capacity of these spontaneous suggestions,
then, Heaven has much more than doubled our existence; for, without it,
and consequently without those faculties and emotions which involve
it, existence would scarcely have been desirable. The very importance
of the benefits which we derive from it, however, renders us perhaps
less sensible of its value; since it is so mingled, with all our
knowledge, and all our plans of action, that we find it difficult to
conceive a state of sentient being, of which it is not a part, and
to estimate, consequently, at a just amount, the advantage which it
affords. The _future memory of perception_ seems to us almost implied
in perception itself; and to speculate on that strange state of
existence which would have been the condition of man, if he had been
formed without the power of remembrance, and capable only of a series
of sensations, has, at first, an appearance almost of absurdity and
contradiction, as if we were imagining conditions which were in their
nature incompatible. Yet, assuredly, if it were possible for us to
consider such a subject _a priori_, the real cause of wonder would
appear to be, not in the _absence_ of the suggestions of memory, as in
the case, imagined, but in that remembrance of which we have the happy
experience. When a feeling, of the existence of which consciousness
furnishes the only evidence, has passed away so completely, that not
even the slightest consciousness of it remains, it would surely,--but
for that experience,--be more natural to suppose that it had perished
altogether, than that it should, at the distance of many years, without
any renewal of it by the external cause which originally produced it,
again start, as it were of itself, into being. To foresee that which
has not yet begun to exist, is, in itself, scarcely more unaccountable,
than to see as it were before us, what has wholly ceased to exist. The
present moment is all of which we are conscious, and which can strictly
be said to have a real existence, in relation to ourselves. That mode
of time, which we call the _past_, and that other mode of time, which
we call the _future_, are both equally unexisting. That the knowledge
of either should be added to us, so as to form a part of our present
consciousness, is a gift of Heaven, most beneficial to us indeed, but
most mysterious, and equally, or nearly equally mysterious, whether
the unexisting time, of which the knowledge is indulged to us, be the
future or the past.
The advantage which we derive from the principle of suggestion, it
must, however, be remarked, consists, not in its mere revival of
thoughts and feelings, of which we had before been conscious, but in
its revival of these in a certain order. If past objects and events
had been suggested to us again, not in that series, in which they
had formerly occurred, nor according to any of those relations,
which human discernment has been able to discover among them, but
in endless confusion and irregularity, the knowledge thus acquired,
however gratifying as a source of mere variety of feeling, would avail
us little, or rather would be wholly profitless, not merely in our
speculative inquiries as philosophers, but in the simplest actions
of common life. It is quite evident, that, in this case, we should
be altogether unable to turn our experience to account, as a mode
of avoiding future evil or obtaining future good; because, for this
application of our knowledge, it would be requisite that events, before
observed, should occur to us, at the time, when similar events might be
expected. We refrain from tasting the poisonous berry, which we have
known to be the occasion of death to him who tasted it; because the
mere _sight_ of it brings again before us the fatal event, which we
have heard or witnessed. We satisfy our appetite with a salutary fruit,
without the slightest apprehension; because its familiar appearance
recals to us the refreshment, which we have repeatedly received. But,
if these suggestions were reversed,--if the agreeable images of health
and refreshment were all that were suggested by the poisonous plant,
and pain, and convulsions, and death were the only images suggested by
the sight of the grateful and nourishing fruit, there can be no doubt,
to which of the two, our unfortunate preference would be given. To
take the most familiar of all instances,--that of language,--which,
either as written or spoken, is in such constant use, and which is so
essential, not merely to our first advance, from absolute barbarism,
but to the common domestic necessities, even of barbarous life,
that, without it, we can scarcely conceive two individuals, however
rude, to exist together,--this, it is evident, could not have been
invented,--nor, if invented, could it serve any other purpose than
to mislead,--if the words spoken were to have no greater chance of
suggesting the meaning intended by the speaker, than any other meaning,
which any other words of the language might be employed to denote. What
social affection could continue for an hour, if the sight of a friend
were to suggest, in intimate combination, not the kindnesses which he
had conferred, and all the enjoyments of which he had been the source,
but the malice, and envy, and revenge of some jealous and disappointed
enemy?
He who has given us, in one simple principle, the power of reviving
the past, has not made his gift so unavailing. The feelings, which
this wonderful principle preserves and restores, arise, not loosely
and confusedly--for what is there in the whole wide scene of nature,
which does so occur?--but, according to general laws or tendencies of
succession, contrived with the most admirable adaptation to our wants,
so as to bring again before us the knowledge formerly acquired by us,
at the very time when it is most profitable that it should return. A
value is thus given to experience, which otherwise would not be worthy
of the name; and we are enabled to extend it almost at pleasure, so as
to profit, not merely by that experience which the events of nature,
occurring in conformity with these general laws, must at any rate have
afforded to us,--but to regulate this very experience itself,--to
dispose objects and events, so that, by tendencies of suggestion, on
the firmness of which we may put perfect reliance, they shall give us,
perhaps at the distance of many years, such lessons as we may wish
them to yield,--and thus to invent and create, in a great measure,
the intellectual and moral history of our future life, as an epic
or dramatic writer arranges at his will the continued scenes of his
various and magnificent narrative. I need not add, that it is on this
skilful management of the laws, which regulate our trains of thought,
the whole theory and practice of _education_ are founded;--that art,
which I have already repeatedly represented to you as the noblest
of all the arts of man--itself the animating spirit of every other
art--which exerts its own immediate operation, not on lifeless things,
but on the affections and faculties of the soul itself--and which has
raised us from the dust, where we slept or trembled, in sluggish, yet
ferocious ignorance, the victims of each other, and of every element
around us, to be the sharers and diffusers of the blessings of social
polity, the measurers of the earth and of the skies, and the rational
worshippers of that eternal Being by whom they and we were created.
That there is a tendency of ideas to suggest each other, without any
renewed perception of the external objects which originally excited
them, and that the suggestion is not, altogether loose and indefinite,
but that certain ideas have a peculiar tendency to suggest certain
other relative ideas in associate trains of thought, is too familiar
to you, as a general fact of our intellectual nature, to require to be
illustrated by example.
It has been beautifully compared, by the most philosophic of our poets,
to the mutual influence of two sympathetic needles, which Strada, in
one of his Prolusions, availing himself of a supposed fact, which was
then believed, or scarcely doubted by many philosophers, makes the
subject of verses, supposed to be recited by Cardinal Bembo, in the
character of Lucretius. The needles were fabled to have been magnetized
together, and suspended over different circles, so as to be capable
of moving along an alphabet. In these circumstances, by the remaining
influence of their original kindred magnetism, they were supposed,
at whatever distance, to follow each other's motions, and pause
accordingly at the same point; so that, by watching them at concerted
hours, the friends, who possessed this happy telegraph, were supposed
to be able to communicate to each other their feelings, with the same
accuracy and confidence as when they were together.
“For when the different images of things,
By chance combin'd have struck the attentive soul
With deeper impulse, or, connected long,
Have drawn his frequent eye; howe'er distinct
The external scenes, yet oft the ideas gain
From that conjunction an eternal tie
And sympathy unbroken. Let the Mind
Recal one partner of the various league,--
Immediate, lo! the firm confederates rise,
And each his former station straight resumes;
One movement governs the consenting throng,
And all at once with rosy pleasure shine,
Or all are sadden'd with the glooms of care.
'Twas thus, if ancient fame the truth unfold,
Two faithful needles, from the informing touch
Of the same parent-stone, together drew
Its mystic virtue, and at first conspir'd
With fatal impulse quivering to the pole,
Then, though disjoin'd by kingdoms,--though the main
Roll'd its broad surge betwixt,--and different stars
Beheld their wakeful motions,--yet preserv'd
The former friendship, and remember'd still
The alliance of their birth. Whate'er the line
Which one possessed, nor pause nor quiet knew
The sure associate, ere, with trembling speed,
He found its path, and fixed unerring there.
Such is the secret union, when we feel
A song, a flower, a name, at once restore
Those long connected scenes where first they mov'd
The attention. Backward through her many walks,
Guiding the wanton fancy to her scope,
To temples, courts, or fields,--with all the band
Of (living)[140] forms, of passions, and designs,
Attendant; whence, if pleasing in itself,
The prospect from that sweet accession gains
Redoubled influence o'er the listening Mind.
By these mysterious ties, the busy power
Of Memory her ideal train preserves
Entire; or, when they would elude her watch,
Reclaims their fleeting footsteps, from the waste
Of dark Oblivion.”[141]
What then are these _mysterious ties_?--or, to state the question more
philosophically, what are the general circumstances which regulate the
successions of our ideas?
That there is some regularity in these successions, must, as I have
already remarked, have been felt by every one; and there are many
references to such regularity in the works of philosophers of every
age. The most striking ancient reference, however, to any general
circumstances, or _laws_ of suggestion,--though the innumeration of
these is hinted, rather than developed at any length,--is that which
you will find in a passage, quoted by Dr Beattie and Mr Stewart, from
Aristotle. It is a passage explanatory of the process by which, in
voluntary reminiscence, we endeavour to discover the idea of which
we are in search. We are said to hunt for it--(Θηρεὺομεν is the word
in the original)--among other ideas, either of objects existing
at present, or at some former time; and from their resemblance,
contrariety, and contiguity--ἀπὸ τοῦ νῦν, ἢ ἂλλου τινὸς, καὶ ἀφ'
ὁμοίου, ἢ ἐναντίου, ἢ τοῦ συνέγγυς. Διὰ τοῦτο γινεταὶ ἡ ἀνάμνησις.[142]
This brief enumeration of the general circumstances which direct us
in reminiscence is worthy of our attention on its own account; and is
not less remarkable on account of the very close resemblance which it
bears to the arrangement afterwards made by Mr Hume, though there is
no reason to believe that the modern philosopher was at all acquainted
with the classification which had, at so great a distance of time,
anticipated his own.
I must remark, however, that though it would be in the highest degree
unjust to the well-known liberality and frankness of Mr Hume's
character, to suppose him to have been aware of any enumeration of the
general circumstances on which suggestion appears to depend, prior to
that which he has himself given us, his attempt was far from being
so original as he supposed. I do not allude merely to the passage of
Aristotle, already quoted, nor to a corresponding passage, which I
might have quoted, from one of the most celebrated of his commentators,
Dr Thomas Aquinas, but to various passages which I have found in the
works of writers of much more recent date, in which the influence
of _resemblance_ and _contiguity_, the two generic circumstances to
which, on his own principles, his own triple division should have been
reduced, is particularly pointed out. Thus, to take an example from an
elementary work of a very eminent author, Ernesti, published in the
year 1734,--his _Initia Doctrinæ Solidioris_,--with what precision has
he laid down those very laws of association of which Mr Hume speaks.
After stating the general fact of suggestion, or association, under
the Latin term _phantasia_, he proceeds to state the principles which
guide it. All the variety of these internal successions of our ideas,
he says, may be reduced to the following law. When one image is present
in the mind, it may suggest the image of some absent object--either
of one that is similar in some respect to that already present--or of
one of which the present is a part--or of one which has been present
together with it on some former occasion. “Hujus autem phantasiæ lex
hæc est; Præsentibus animo rerum imaginibus quibuscunque, recurrere et
redire ad animum possunt rerum absentium olimque perceptarum imagines,
præsentibus similes, vel quarum, quæ sunt præsentes, partes sunt,--vel
denique, quas cum præsentibus simul hausimus.”[143]
Even the arrangement, as stated by Mr Hume, is not expressed in more
formal terms. But as it is to his arrangement the philosophers of our
own country are accustomed to refer, in treating of association, the
importance thus attached to it gives it a preferable claim to our
fuller discussion. It is stated by him briefly in two paragraphs of his
Essay on the Association of Ideas.