A Treatise of Human Nature · Chapter
Section IV: Of the Connection or Association of Ideas explained
Hume explores the principles that guide the imagination in connecting simple ideas, identifying three associative qualities: resemblance, contiguity in time or place, and cause and effect.
What happens
Hume explores the principles that guide the imagination in connecting simple ideas, identifying three associative qualities: resemblance, contiguity in time or place, and cause and effect. He argues that these principles act as a gentle force, making the imagination uniform and explaining the coherence of complex ideas. He extends the relation of cause and effect to include power and authority, and compares this mental attraction to physical attraction, cautioning against over-inquiring into causes. The chapter concludes by introducing the division of complex ideas into relations, modes, and substances.
Themes in this chapter
Association of Ideas
Hume identifies three principles of association—resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect—that guide the imagination's connection of simple ideas.
Custom and General Rules
The association of ideas is described as a 'gentle force' that operates uniformly, and Hume notes that long custom leads the imagination to follow regular patterns.
Characters to notice
- David Hume
Author and narrator, presenting the principles of association of ideas.
Key passages
“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.”
If ideas were completely random, they would only combine by chance, but they consistently form complex ideas, indicating there must be a connecting principle that naturally links one idea to another.
Hume establishes the necessity of associative principles to explain the regularity of thought.
“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.”
The mind moves from one idea to another through three qualities: resemblance, contiguity in time or place, and cause and effect.
This is the core statement of Hume's associationist theory.
“Here is a kind of Attraction, which in the mental world will be found to have as extraordinary effects as in the natural, and to show itself in as many and as various forms.”
This association acts like a mental gravity, producing effects as remarkable and varied as physical attraction.
Hume draws an analogy between mental association and Newtonian attraction.