account for it by a subtle elastic ether, this great man (if in so
great a man it be not impious to discover anything like a blemish)
seemed to have quitted his usual cautious manner of philosophizing;
since, perhaps, allowing all that has been advanced on this subject to
be sufficiently proved, I think it leaves us with as many difficulties
as it found us. That great chain of causes, which, linking one to
another, even to the throne of God himself, can never be unravelled by
any industry of ours. When we go but one step beyond the immediate
sensible qualities of things, we go out of our depth. All we do after is
but a faint struggle, that shows we are in an element which does not
belong to us. So that when I speak of cause, and efficient cause, I only
mean certain affections of the mind, that cause certain changes in the
body; or certain powers and properties in bodies, that work a change in
the mind. As, if I were to explain the motion of a body falling to the
ground, I would say it was caused by gravity; and I would endeavor to
show after what manner this power operated, without attempting to show
why it operated in this manner: or, if I were to explain the effects of
bodies striking one another by the common laws of percussion, I should
not endeavor to explain how motion itself is communicated.

SECTION II.

ASSOCIATION.

It is no small bar in the way of our inquiry into the cause of our
passions, that the occasions of many of them are given, and that their
governing motions are communicated at a time when we have not capacity
to reflect on them; at a time of which all sort of memory is worn out
of our minds. For besides such things as affect us in various manners,
according to their natural powers, there are associations made at that
early season, which we find it very hard afterwards to distinguish from
natural effects. Not to mention the unaccountable antipathies which we
find in many persons, we all find it impossible to remember when a steep
became more terrible than a plain; or fire or water more terrible than a
clod of earth; though all these are very probably either conclusions
from experience, or arising from the premonitions of others; and some of
them impressed, in all likelihood, pretty late. But as it must be
allowed that many things affect us after a certain manner, not by any
natural powers they have for that purpose, but by association; so it
would be absurd, on the other hand, to say that all t