d to lead him subsequently into a mistake of no small
practical moment.

We come next to the 'Association of Ideas,' the influence of which
almost all of Hume's successors, as well as himself, seem to me to have
greatly over-rated. That there is a 'principle of connection between the
different thoughts or ideas of the mind' is, as he says, sufficiently
evident; and that this principle is, as he was apparently the first to
remark, threefold, deriving its efficacy from resemblance, contiguity in
time or place, and cause or effect, may also be admitted with little
qualification. But I presume to think that he is quite incorrect in
adding that, in virtue of the aforesaid principle, ideas 'introduce each
other with a certain degree of method or regularity.' You are walking,
let us suppose, through Hyde Park, thinking of nothing more particular
than that the morning is a pleasant one, when you suddenly find yourself
in imagination pacing the shore of the Dead Sea, and, pausing to ask
yourself how you got there, you discover, perhaps, that it was by the
following steps. Remarking some landscape effect in the distance, you
were reminded of a similar one which you had remarked years before while
taking a walk fifty miles off in Sussex. Here resemblance operated. Then
you recollected how during that walk you were thinking about Mr. Buckle,
whose lucubrations you had been conning over before starting. Here
entered contiguity both of time and space. The name of Buckle reminded
you how that promising writer ended his travels abroad by dying of a
fever which he caught while sailing over the sites of the engulphed
cities of the plain. Here cause and effect came into action; and, so
far, everything accords with Hume's theory. But if you repeat the same
walk to-morrow, the same landscape effect will almost certainly suggest
a train of ideas quite different from that of to-day. Perhaps it may
begin by reminding you of landscape effects in general; then of Mr.
Ruskin, who has discoursed so eloquently on that topic, and next of Mr.
Ruskin's 'Stones of Venice,' from whence it is equal chances whether
your thoughts radiate, on one side of the compass, to stone china, or
Stoney Stratford, or Stonewall Jackson, or, on the other, to the
'Venetian Bracelet,' L. E. L. and Fernando Po, or to that effective
adaptation of the Venetian style of architecture, the Railway Station at
St. Pancras, and thence to some town or other on the Midland Line.

T