[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.