SECT. IV. OF THE CONNEXION OR ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS.


As all simple ideas may be separated by the imagination, and may be
united again in what form it pleases, nothing would be more unaccountable
than the operations of that faculty, were it not guided by some universal
principles, which render it, in some measure, uniform with itself in all
times and places. Were ideas entirely loose and unconnected, chance alone
would join them; and it is impossible the same simple ideas should fall
regularly into complex ones (as they Commonly do) without some bond of
union among them, some associating quality, by which one idea naturally
introduces another. This uniting principle among ideas is not to be
considered as an inseparable connexion; for that has been already
excluded from the imagination: Nor yet are we to conclude, that without
it the mind cannot join two ideas; for nothing is more free than that
faculty: but we are only to regard it as a gentle force, which commonly
prevails, and is the cause why, among other things, languages so nearly
correspond to each other; nature in a manner pointing out to every one
those simple ideas, which are most proper to be united in a complex one.
The qualities, from which this association arises, and by which the mind
is after this manner conveyed from one idea to another, are three, viz.
RESEMBLANCE, CONTIGUITY in time or place, and CAUSE and EFFECT.

I believe it will not be very necessary to prove, that these qualities
produce an association among ideas, and upon the appearance of one idea
naturally introduce another. It is plain, that in the course of our
thinking, and in the constant revolution of our ideas, our imagination
runs easily from one idea to any other that resembles it, and that this