Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: H. THEIR PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEMS AND OPINIONS. CHAPTER I. PRELIMINARY REMARKS ON THE THEORY OF ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS THE PHYSICAL GROUNDWORK OF THE THEORY—HARTLEY'S VIBRATIONS—JAMES MILL AND HARTLEY ON SENSATIONS IDEAS AS COPIES OF SENSATIONS. The theory of Association of Ideas, now so familiar to us as applied to the different practical fields of language, law, morals, politics, education, religion, and sociology, was first formulated as a philosophical system, and made the serious study of a lifetime, by Hartley. Obvious enough it seems when stated, and it is only when the question of the extent of its application comes in, that the widest divergency of opinion is manifested. Some sort of belief in it has always been tacitly recognized as the ground of prediction in the common affairs of life, and has been at the root of most of the proverbial philosophy and folklore of ages. Nor were more formal, though isolated, admissions of its validity wanting in the works of pre-Hartleian philosophers in different countries. Aristotle and Hobbes had noticed the principle (the latter under the name of Mental HISTORY OF THE ASSOCIATION THEORY. 25 Discourse). In France, Condillac (Hartley's contemporary) worked out similar results. The name had been invented by Locke.1 One Gay had very briefly, but in a lucid and agreeable manner, sketched out his ideas on the subject, and applied the doctrine chiefly to moral phenomena, both in a dissertation prefixed to Edmund Law's translation and edition of Archbishop King's " Origin of Evil," and (probably) in an anonymous " Enquiry into the Origin of the Human Appetites and Affections " (1747), printed in Dr. Purr's "Metaphysical Tracts of the 18th Century " [pp. 48—170]. Edmund Law, in his prefatory observations to King's work [... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.