http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/132032290

Hartley's theory of the human mind, on the principle of the association of ideas : with essays relating to the subject of it. By Joseph Priestley

"The work here offered to the public consists of papers written at different times, but taking their rise from the following occasion. About eighteen years ago I was informed that the Rev. Mr. Gay asserted the possibility of deducing all our intellectual pleasures and pains from association. This put me upon considering the power of association. Mr. Gay published his sentiments on this matter, about the same time, in a dissertation on the Fundamental Principle of Virtue, prefixed to Mr. Archdeacon Law's translation of Archbishop King's Origin of Evil. From inquiring into the power of association I was led to examine both its consequences, in respect of morality and religion, and its physical cause. By degrees many dispositions foreign to the doctrine of association, or or at least, not immediately connected with it, intermixed themselves. I have here put together all my separate papers on these subjects, digesting them in such order as they seemed naturally to suggest, and adding such things as were necessary to make the whole appear more complete and systematical. It has long been the opinion of all the admirer's of Dr. David Hartley among my acquaintance, as well as my own, that is Observations on Man could not have failed to have been more generally read and his theory of the human mind to have prevailed, if it had been made more intelligible; and if the work had not been clogged with a whole system of moral and religious knowledge; which, however excellent, is, in a great measure, foreign to it. Both these obstacles it is my object in this publication to remove; by exhibiting his theory of the human mind, as far as it relates to the doctrine of association of ideas"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved).

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