hese examples will be readily recognized as fair average specimens of
those unpremeditated trains of thought with which we are all familiar.
Is there, then, in the arrangement of the consecutive thoughts of which
the several trains are composed, any method or regularity common, I will
not say to all, but to any two of them? According to Hume and to most of
his successors in the same path of enquiry, there ought to be. Thus the
illustrious author of the 'Analysis of the Human Mind' affirms, without
rebuke or protest from any one of his not less illustrious commentators,
that 'our ideas spring up or exist in the order in which the sensations
existed of which they are the copies: that of those sensations which
occurred synchronically, the ideas also spring up synchronically, and
that of the sensations which occurred successively, the ideas rise
successively.' And he adds, 'this is the general law of the Association
of Ideas,' remarking, by way of illustration, that, as 'I have seen the
sun, and the sky in which it is placed, synchronically, if I think of
the one I think of the other at the same time'; and that, as when
committing to memory a passage of words, as, for instance, the Lord's
Prayer, we pronounce the words in successive order, and have
consequently the sensation of the words in successive order, so when we
proceed to repeat the passage, 'the ideas of the words also rise in
succession, _Our_ suggesting _Father, Father_ suggesting _which, which_
suggesting _art_, and so on to the end.'[29]

Oh Law! Law! most abused of scientific terms, what an infinity of
dogmatic illegalities are committed in thy name! The one thing which
scientific law implies is regularity of occurrence, but what regulation
is it that is obeyed in common by a number of sequences commencing at
the same point in Hyde Park, yet terminating, one in Africa, another in
America, a third in Palestine, and a fourth in the centre of England?
Can it have been seriously said that it is impossible for us to think of
the sky without thinking simultaneously of the sun which illuminates
the sky? Is it impossible for us to think instead of the ether which
constitutes it, or peradventure even of the resemblance between its
celestial azure and what Moore calls the 'most unholy blue' of some
frolicsome Cynthia's eyes? And is it not notorious that when saying the
Lord's Prayer--a prayer which, in spite of the injunction by which its
original dictation was accompani