exist, it would think its power of imagination to be a virtue of its
nature and not a defect, especially if this faculty of imagining
depended upon its own nature alone, that is to say, if this faculty of
the mind were free.

_Association of Ideas and Memory_

If the human body has at any time been simultaneously affected by two or
more bodies, whenever the mind afterwards imagines one of them, it will
also remember the others.

We clearly understand by this what memory is. It is nothing else than a
certain concatenation of ideas, involving the nature of things which are
outside the human body, a concatenation which corresponds in the mind to
the order and concatenation of the modifications of the human body. I
say, firstly, that it is a concatenation of those ideas only which
involve the nature of things which are outside the human body, and not
of those ideas which explain the nature of those things, for there are
in truth ideas of the modifications of the human body, which involve its
nature as well as the nature of external bodies. I say, in the second
place, that this concatenation takes place according to the order and
concatenation of the modifications of the human body, that I may
distinguish it from the concatenation of ideas which takes place
according to the order of the intellect, and enables the mind to
perceive things through their first causes, and is the same in all men.

Hence we can clearly understand how it is that the mind from the thought
of one thing at once turns to the thought of another thing which is not
in any way like the first. For example, from the thought of the word
_pomum_ a Roman immediately turned to the thought of the fruit, which
has no resemblance to the articulate sound _pomum_, nor anything in
common with it, excepting this, that the body of that man was often
affected by the thing and the sound; that is to say, he often heard the
word _pomum_ when he saw the fruit. In this manner each person will turn
from one thought to another according to the manner in which the habit
of each has arranged the images of things in the body. The soldier, for
instance, if he sees the footsteps of a horse in the sand, will
immediately turn from the thought of a horse to the thought of a
horseman, and so to the thought of war. The countryman, on the other
hand, from the thought of a horse will turn to the thought of his plow,
his field, etc.; and thus each person will turn from one thought to