The same evidence follows us in our second principle, of the liberty of the imagination to transpose and change its ideas.  The fables we meet with in poems and romances put this entirely out of the question.  Nature there is totally confounded, and nothing mentioned but winged horses, fiery dragons, and monstrous giants.  Nor will this liberty of the fancy appear strange, when we consider, that all our ideas are copyed from our impressions, and that there are not any two impressions which are perfectly inseparable.  Not to mention, that this is an evident consequence of the division of ideas into simple and complex.  Where-ever the imagination perceives a difference among ideas, it can easily produce a separation.

SECT.  IV.  OF THE CONNEXION OR ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS.

As all simple ideas may be separated by the imagination, and may be united again in what form it pleases, nothing would be more unaccountable than the operations of that faculty, were it not guided by some universal principles, which render it, in some measure, uniform with itself in all times and places.  Were ideas entirely loose and unconnected, chance alone would join them; and it is impossible the same simple ideas should fall regularly into complex ones (as they Commonly do) without some bond of union among them, some associating quality, by which one idea naturally introduces another.  This uniting principle among ideas is not to be considered as an inseparable connexion; for that has been already excluded from the imagination:  Nor yet are we to conclude, that without it the mind cannot join two ideas; for nothing is more free than that faculty:  but we are only to regard it as a gentle force, which commonly prevails, and is the cause why, among other things, languages so nearly correspond to each other; nature in a manner pointing out to every one those simple ideas, which are most proper to be united in a complex one.  The qualities, from which this association arises, and by which the mind is after this manner conveyed from one idea to another, are three, viz.  resemblance, contiguity in time or place, and cause and effect.

I believe it will not be very necessary to prove, that these qualities produce an association among ideas, and upon the appearance of one idea naturally introduce another.  It is plain, that in the course of our thinking, and in the constant revolution of our ideas, our imagination runs easily from one idea to any other that resembles it, and that this quality alone is to the fancy a sufficient bond and association.  It is likewise evident that as the senses, in changing their objects, are necessitated to change them regularly, and take them as they lie contiguous to each other, the imagination must by long custom acquire the same method of thinking, and run along the parts