4. Assizes are sometimes used in a wider legislative connection by early chroniclers and historians, the " assisae of the realnie," e.g., occasionally meaning the organic laws of the country. In a still more extended sense, the "Assizes of Jerusalem" is the name given to the code of laws framed for the kingdom of Jerusalem at the instance of Godfrey of Bouillon, the Crusader.
ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS, or Mental Association, is a general name used in psychology to express the conditions under which representations arise in consciousness, and also is the name of a principle of explanation put forward by an important school of thinkers to account generally for the facts of mental life. The more common expression, from the time of Locke, who seems to have first employed it, has been Association of Ideas ; but it is allowed or urged on all hands that this phrase contains too narrow a reference ; association, in either of the senses above noted, extending beyond ideas or thoughts proper to every class of mental states. In the long and erudite Note D**, appended by Sir W. Hamilton to his edition of Reid s Works, and offered as a contribution towards a history of the doctrine of mental suggestion or association, many anticipations of modern statements are cited from the works of ancient or mediaeval thinkers, and for Aristotle, in particular, the glory is claimed of having at once originated the doctrine and practically brought it to perfection. Aristotle s enunciation of the doctrine is certainly very remarkable. As translated by Hamilton, but without his interpolations, the classical passage from the tract De Memoria et Reminiscentia runs as follows:—
"When, therefore, we accomplish an act of reminiscence, we pass through a certain series of precursive movements, until we arrive at a movement on which the one we are in quest of is habitually consequent. Hence, too, it is that we hunt through the mental train, excogitating from the present or some other, and from similar or contrary or coadjacent. Through this process reminis cence takes place. For the movements are, in these cases, some times at the same time, sometimes parts of the same whole, so that the subsequent movement is already more than half accomplished."
The passage is obscure (leaving open to Hamilton to suggest a peculiar interpretation of it, that may be noticed in connection with the elaborate doctrine of association put forward by himself, as if to evince the shortcomings rather than the perfection of Aristotle s), but it does in any case indicate the various principles commonly termed Contiguity, Similarity, and Contrast ; and, though the statement of these cannot be said to be followed up by an effective exposition or application, it quite equals in scope the observations of many a modern inquirer. Zeno the Stoic also, and Epicurus, according to the report of Diogenes Laertius (vii. 52, x. 32, overlooked by Hamilton), enumerated similar principles of mental associa tion. By St August in, at the end of his long rhapsody on the wonders of memory in book x. of his Confessions, it was noted (c. 19) that the mind, when it tries to remember something it knows it has forgotten, has, as it were, hold of part and thence makes quest after the other part. Meanwhile and later, Aristotle s doctrine received a more or less intelligent expansion and illustration from the ancient commentators and the schoolmen ; and in the still later period of transition from the age of scholasticism to the time of modern philosophy, prolonged in the works of some writers far into the 17th century, Hamilton, from the stores of his learning, is able to adduce not a few philosophical authorities who gave prominence to the general fact of mental association the Spaniard Ludo- yicus Vives (1492-1540) especially being most exhaustive in his account of the conditions of memory. This act of justice, however, once rendered to earlier inquirers, it is to modern views of association that attention may fairlv be confined.
In Hobbes s psychology so much importance is assigned to what he called, variously, the succession, sequence, series, consequence, coherence, train, &c., of imaginations or thoughts in mental discourse, that he has not seldom been regarded, by those who did not look farther back, as the founder of the theory of mental association. He did, indeed, vividly conceive and illustrate the principle of Contiguity, but, as Hamilton conclusively shows, he reproduced in his exposition but a part of the Aristotelian doctrine, nor even this without wavering ; representing the sequence of images, in such states as dreams, now (in his Human Nature) as casual or incoherent, now (in Leviathan), following Aristotle, as simply unguided. Not before Hume, among the moderns, is there express question as to a number of distinct principles of association. Locke had, meanwhile, introduced the phrase Association of Ideas as the title of a supplementary chapter incorporated with the fourth edition of his Essay, meaning it, however, only as the name of a principle accounting for the mental pecu liarities of individuals, with little or no suggestion of its general psychological import. Of this last Hume had the strongest impression, and thinking himself, in forgetfulness or ignorance of Aristotle s doctrine of reminiscence, the first inquirer that had ever attempted to enumerate all the modes of normal association among mental states, he brought them to three Resemblance, Contiguity in time and place, Cause and (or) Effect. Without professing to arrive at this result otherwise than by an inductive con sideration of instances, he yet believed his enumeration to be exhaustive, and sought to prove it so by resolving Contrast one of Aristotle s heads, commonly received as a mixture of causation and resemblance. Viewed in relation to his general philosophical position, it must always remain a perplexing feature of Hume s list of principles, that he specified Causation as a principle distinct from Contiguity in time, while otherwise the list has no superiority to Aristotle s. Hume s fellow-countrymen, Gerard and Beattie, in opposition to him, recurred accord ingly to the traditional enumeration ; and, in like manner, Dugald Stewart put forward Resemblance, Contrariety, and Vicinity in time and place, though he added, as another obvious principle, accidental coincidence in the sounds of Words, and farther noted three other cases of relation, namely, Cause and Effect, Means and End, and Premisses and Conclusion, as holding among tho trains of thought under circumstances of special atten tion. Reid, preceding Stewart, was rather disposed, for his own part, to make light of the subject of as sociation, vaguely remarking that it seems to require no other original quality of mind but the power of habit to explain the spontaneous recurrence of trains of thinking, when become familiar by frequent repetition (Intellectual Poivers, p. 387). The counter-observation of his editor, Hamilton, that we can as well explain habit by association as association by habit, might with reason have been pointed more sharply.
tion, or association, given in outline in Note D***. following the historical note before mentioned, at the end of his edition of Jleid s Works, calls for more special notice, as perhaps the most elaborate expression yet devised for the principles involved in the phenomena of mental repre sentation. It is a development, greatly modified, of the doctrine expounded in his Lectures on Metaphysics (vol. ii. p. 223, seq.), which in agreement with some foreign authorities, reduced the principles of association first to two Simultaneity and Affinity, and these farther to one supreme principle of Redintegration or Totality. In the ultimate scheme he posits no less than fcur general laws of
mental succession concerned in reproduction: (1.) Associa-
