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The connections between stimuli, sensations and muscular action are not of this order. Nor, if we were aware of such special dependencies, could these be presented to explain the connections of thought. Ideas manifestly cohere as ideas in the mind by the mind's action; they are not seen to follow each other by a physical link. There are in this doctrine of association, as very generally held, a wonderful displacement of plain facts by obscure ones, an astonishing assumption of facts, and a strange insufficiency in the expositions offered.

The law of association, now so omnipotent in philosophy, has grown up slowly in connection with that empirical tendency which more and more divests the mind of power, and accumulates within it a series of impressions that carry with them their own connections. This philosophy should l)e able, first, to show clearly and certainly that a given cerebral state is the precise equivalent of a given mental one, and its immediate cause. Nothing approximating this has been done in a single instance. It should then show that these cerebral states have cerebral laws, by which they combine with and follow each other; and, third, that these physical connections are the exact equivalents and causes of the various relations of thoughts, feelings, and volitions to each other. This work has not been so much as entered on. The law of association is left regnant when no sufficient ground of connection has been disclosed between cerebral facts and mental facts, and even while the cerebral facts themselves are purely theoretical. If all this had been done, we should have simply a physical or organic philosophy in place of a mental one; but it has not been done. Ideas, thoughts, feelings, volitions are intangible, have no power over each other or relation to each other save those intangible ones which the mind itself, in evoking them, imparts to them. The mind makes a feeling to be a feeling, and so