Essays on the Principles of Human Action; on the Systems of Hartley and Helvetius; and on Abstract Ideas [1835]

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1835 edition. Excerpt: ...lastly, that all ideas impressed at the same time acquire a power of exciting one another afterwards without any regard to the coincidence of their imaginary seats in the brain, and that therefore the true account of the principle of association must be derived from the first cause, the coincidence of time, and not from the latter cause, the proximity of situation, which bears no manner of proportion to the effects produced. I have always had the same feeling with respect to Hartley (still granting his power to the utmost) which is pleasantly expressed in an old author, Roger Bacon, quoted by Sir Kenelm Digby in his answer to Sir Thomas Browne. "Those students," he says, " who busy themselves much with such notions as relate wholly to the fantasie, do hardly ever become idoneous for abstracted metaphysical speculations; the one having bulky foundation of matter or of the accidents of it to settle upon (at the least with one foot): the other flying continually, even to a lessening pitch, in the subtil air. And accordingly, it hath been generally noted, that the exactest mathematicians, who converse altogether with lines, figures, and other differences of quantity, have seldom proved eminent in metaphysicks or speculative divinity. Nor again, the professors of these sciences in the other arts. Much less can it be expected, that an excellent physician, whose fancy is always fraught with the material drugs that he prescribed! his apothecary to compound his medicines of, and whose hands are inured to the cutting up, and eyes to the inspection of anatomized bodies, should easily and with success, flie his thoughts at so towring a game, as a pure intellect, a separated and unbodied soul." I confess I feel in reading Hartley,...