Contrast, therefore, as an associating link, would draw from three sources, Relativity, Contiguity, and Similarity. It would also be heightened, in many instances, by the presence of strong feelings or emotions, as in the contemplation of startling changes, and the vicissitudes of things. Being one of the effects habitually introduced in Art and in Oratory, we are more than ordinarily impressed by the things so made use of—infancy beside old age, squalor following on splendour, abasement succeeding to elevation.
The associating principle of Contrast cannot be put forward as a basis of distinction in intellectual character. There is no such a thing as a special aptitude for Contrasts. There may be, in certain minds given to emotion, a fondness for the impressive or emotional contrasts; but there is no intellectual gift, subsisting apart from other powers and rising and falling independently, for the mutual recall of contrasting qualities. Whenever we feel a difference we make a contrast; the two differing things, are contrasting things, and are both known in one indivisible act of thought. To be unable to bring up the contrast of a subject present to the view, is not to know the subject; we cannot possess intelligently the conception of “up,” and be oblivious to, or incapable of remembering, “down.” Forgetfulness in this department is not the snapping of a link, as in Contiguity, or the dulness that cannot reach a similitude; it is the entire blank of conception or knowledge. The north pole of a magnet cannot be in the view, and the south pole in oblivion.—B.
[39] The author and Mr. Bain agree in rejecting Contrast as an independent principle of association. I think they might 126 have gone further, and denied it even as a derivative one. All the cases considered as examples of it seem to me to depend on something else. I greatly doubt if the sight or thought of a dwarf has intrinsically any tendency to recall the idea of a giant. Things certainly do remind us of their own absence, because (as pointed out by Mr. Bain) we are only conscious of their presence by comparison with their absence; and for a further reason, arising out of the former, viz. that, in our practical judgments, we are led to think of the case of their presence and the case of their absence by one and the same act of thought, having commonly to choose between the two. But it does not seem to me that things have any special tendency to remind us of their positive opposites. Black does not remind us of white more than of red or green. If light reminds us of darkness, it is because darkness is the mere negation, or absence, of light. The case of heat and cold is more complex. The sensation of heat recalls to us the absence of that sensation: if the sensation amounts to pain, it calls up the idea of relief from it; that is, of its absence, associated by contiguity with the pleasant feeling which accompanies the change. But cold is not the mere absence of heat; it is itself a positive sensation. If heat suggests to us the idea of the sensation of cold, it is not because of the contrast, but because the close connection which exists between the outward conditions of both, and the consequent identity of the means we employ for regulating them, cause the thought of cold and that of heat to be frequently presented to us in contiguity.—Ed.
CHAPTER IV.
NAMING.
“I endeavour, as much as I can, to deliver myself from those fallacies which we are apt to put upon ourselves, by taking words for things. It helps not our ignorance to feign a knowledge where we have none, by making a noise with sounds without clear and distinct significations. Names made at pleasure, neither alter the nature of things, nor make us understand them, but as they are signs of, and stand for, determined ideas.”—Locke, Hum. Und. b. ii. ch. 13, § 18.
WE have now surveyed the more simple and obvious phenomena of the human mind. We have seen, first, that we have SENSATIONS; secondly, that we have IDEAS, the copies of those sensations; thirdly, that those ideas are sometimes SIMPLE, the copies of one sensation; sometimes COMPLEX, the copies of several sensations so combined as to appear not several ideas, but one idea; and, fourthly, that we have TRAINS of those ideas, or one succeeding another without end.
These are simple facts of our nature, attested by experience; and my chief object in fixing upon them the attention of the reader has been, to convey to him that accurate and steady conception of them, which is requisite for the successful prosecution of the subsequent inquiries.
128 After delineating the simple and elementary states of consciousness, it follows, in order, that we should endeavour to show what is contained in those that are complex. But in all the more complicated cases of human consciousness something of the process of Naming is involved. These cases, of course, cannot be unfolded, till the artifice of Naming is made known. This, therefore, is necessarily an intermediate inquiry; and one to which it is necessary that we should devote a particular degree of attention.