At least, the only passage of his works,
bearing on this subject, with which I am acquainted, contains nothing
but a very odd version of the physiological views of Descartes:--
"When I received the relations of _resemblance_, _contiguity_, and
_causation_, as principles of union among ideas, without examining
into their causes, 'twas more in prosecution of my first maxim,
that we must in the end rest contented with experience, than for
want of something specious and plausible which I might have
displayed on that subject. '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 the power of exciting any
idea it pleases; whenever it despatches 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 to 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.
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