Note 476 — Chapter XIV · [463]

Essay, bk. ii, chap. xxxiii, § 6. Compare Hume, who, like Locke, only uses the principle to account for unreasonable and obstructive mental associations:

"'Twould have been easy to have made an imaginary dissection of the brain, and have shown why, upon our conception of any idea, the animal spirits run into all the contiguous traces, and rouse up the other ideas that are related to it. But though I have neglected any advantage which I might have drawn from this topic in explaining the relations of ideas, I am afraid I must here have recourse to it, in order to account for the mistakes that arise from these relations. I shall therefore observe, that as the mind is endowed with a power of exciting any idea it pleases; whenever it dispatches the spirits into that region of the brain in which the idea is placed, these spirits always excite the idea, when they run precisely into the proper traces, and rummage that cell which belongs to the idea. But as their motion is seldom direct, and naturally turns a little to the one side or the other: for this reason the animal spirits, falling into the contiguous traces, present other related ideas in lieu of that which the mind desired at first to survey. This change we are not always sensible of; but continuing still the same train of thought, make use of the related idea which is presented to us, and employ it in our reasoning, as if it were the same with what we demanded. This is the cause of many mistakes and sophisms in philosophy; as will naturally be imagined, and as it would be easy to show, if there was occasion."