peat the experiment often, and
constantly with the same result, the association will be so strongly
formed, that the child will ever afterwards expect these two things to
happen together: whenever he puts his finger into fire, he will expect
to feel pain; he will learn yet further, as these things regularly
follow one another, to think one the cause, and the other the effect.
He may not have words to express these ideas; nor can we explain how
the belief that events, which have happened together, will again
happen together, is by experience induced in the mind. This is a fact,
which no metaphysicians pretend to dispute; but it has not yet, that
we know of, been accounted for by any. It would be rash to assert,
that it will not in future be explained, but at present we are totally
in the dark upon the subject. It is sufficient for our purpose to
observe, that this association of facts, or of ideas, affects the
actions of all rational beings, and of many animals who are called
irrational. Would you teach a dog or a horse to obey you; do you not
associate pleasure, or pain, with the things you wish that they should
practise, or avoid? The impatient and ignorant give infinitely more
pain than is necessary to the animals they educate. If the pain, which
we would associate with any action, do not _immediately_ follow it,
the child does not understand us; if several events happen nearly at
the same time, it is impossible that a child can at first distinguish
which are causes, and which are effects. Suppose, that a mother would
teach her little son, that he must not put his dirty shoes upon her
clean sofa: if she frowns upon him, or speaks to him in an angry tone,
at the instant that he sets his foot and shoe upon the sofa, he
desists; but he has only learned, that putting a foot upon the sofa,
and his mother's frown, follow each other; his mother's frown, from
former associations, gives him perhaps, some pain, or the expectation
of some pain, and consequently he avoids repeating the action which
immediately preceded the frown. If, a short time afterwards, the
little boy, forgetting the frown, accidentally gets upon the sofa
_without his shoes_, no evil follows; but it is not probable, that he
can, by this single experiment, discover that his shoes have made all
the difference in the two cases. Children are frequently so much
puzzled by their confused experience of impunity and punishment, that
they are quite at a loss how to co