## 1. Reception of the *Observations on Man*



In the 18th and 19th centuries, Hartley's *Observations*
was valued very highly by people within the realm of religious
dissent, scientific progress, and social reform. Writing in 1774,
Joseph Priestley, a leading Unitarian and the foremost scientist in
Britain, wrote that the *Observations* "contains a new
and most extensive science" and promised that "the study
of it ... will be like entering upon a new world." He
added: "I think myself more indebted to this one treatise, than
to all the books I ever read beside; the scriptures excepted"
(1774, xix).



Priestley and his fellow Unitarians gave the *Observations* a
central place in the curriculum in the dissenting academies. (For
admission to Oxford and Cambridge Universities, a student had to
subscribe to the doctrines of the Church of England--a
requirement which excluded Unitarians, who did not accept that Jesus
is God; hence the dissenters' need for their own institutions of
higher learning.) From one report, we learn that students in one
academy studied it for two hours every morning. In addition, in the
late 1700s student radicals at Cambridge and Oxford also had their
copies.



Thus the *Observations* was the focus of sustained study and
high esteem--if you followed Priestley, the most important book,
after the Bible. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, converted to
Priestleian Unitarianism at Cambridge, had his portrait painted
holding a copy of the *Observations* (see Paley 1999,
18-23), and named his first son David Hartley Coleridge. Other
writers offer similar testimonies. Few works discussed in this
encyclopedia have been the objects of such deep personal
involvement.



While its admirers thought it "a new science" of human
nature, its critics--including Thomas Reid (1785, 84-94)
and the later Coleridge ([1817] 1983), no longer the youthful
radical--considered Hartley's *Observations*
conceptually wrong and morally hazardous. For example, Sir James
Mackintosh, who sympathetically praised "the extraordinary value
of Hartley's system" (1836, 253), nonetheless saw in
Hartley's belief that consciousness derives from neurological
processes an "error ... deeper and more fundamental than
any other," sure to "involv[e] all nature in darkness and
confusion" (245).



In the nineteenth century, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, and William
B. Carpenter (who all had studied the *Observations* in
dissenting academies), along with Alexander Bain, founded the school
of thought known as "association psychology." They
credited Hartley with being the precursor of the science they had
developed. However, John Stuart Mill wrote in the Preface to the 1869
edition of his father's *Analysis of the Phenomena of the
Human Mind*, that, compared to his father's work,
Hartley's *Observations* "is little more than a
sketch, though an eminently suggestive one" (Mill 1869,
1:xi-12). Hardly a recommendation to read the book that the
Mills had poured over as students. Why look at the sketch, when the
fully drawn portrait is available?



By the late 1800s Priestleian Unitarianism, as a tradition of
philosophical practice, had died out; academic philosophers,
especially those trained in the Scottish school of common sense (the
official philosophy taught, for example, by the Unitarians who ran
Harvard), knew that the *Observations* rested on a fundamental
mistake; and association psychologists preserved a memory of this
precursor of their science. Formal interest in Hartley's
*Observations*, as a work to be read and pondered, discussed in
lectures, written about in articles and books, had collapsed. The last
serious engagement with the *Observations* appears in William
James's *Principles of Psychology* (1890, 1:553), and
even there a casual reader could easily miss it.



In the twentieth century, Hartley's *Observations*
remained outside the philosophical curriculum:
philosophers-in-training could follow the well-traveled route from the
"British empiricists" to Kant without turning aside to
pick it up. And even if a person had wanted to, doing so was
difficult, for after the editions of 1749, 1775, 1791, 1810, and 1834,
and translations into French (1755 and 1802), German (1772), and
Italian (1809), no further editions were published. Today, paperback
reprints of earlier editions are available, but there is no modern
critical edition.



In his *Second Treatise of Government*, Locke famously stated
that "labor fixes property." It is the labor of people in
the fields of philosophy that fixes a philosophical text as a
"property"--that marks its bounds and assesses its
value. But a work that has remained outside contemporary
philosophy's pedagogical economy, as has Hartley's
*Observations*, is in an indeterminate position. A person today
who picks the book up would have in hand a long book covering a
multitude of topics. How to determine its properties? And how to
answer the question of economics: What is its worth? To address these
questions, let us imagine how one of Hartley's colleagues, a
Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), might have responded to the book on
its appearance in 1749.


## 2. Hartley's *Observations*--At First Sight



A FRS in regular attendance at the society's London meetings
would be acquainted with Hartley, and would know that he had emerged
the victor in a public medical controversy ten years earlier, which
established his reputation in medical circles both in Britain and on
the Continent. Hartley, working with Stephen Hales, researched the
chemical basis for what they thought an effective folk remedy for
bladder stones--a painful and hazardous condition that impaired
the lives of Hartley himself and many others, including Benjamin
Franklin. In the course of the controversy, Hartley had published a
self-revealing account of the prolonged and intense suffering he had
endured, while undergoing the treatment.



The FRS would know that this orphaned son of a Yorkshire clergyman was
now a successful physician, thanks in part to powerful patrons
(including the Cornwallis family, and the Duke of Newcastle, who was
in effect prime minister), had come into personal wealth, thanks to
his second marriage, and that he had devoted himself to various
philanthropic projects, including the publication of the shorthand
system devised by his friend, John Byrom.



If the FRS knew Hartley as a friend, he would know him to be a
mathematician with a special interest in statistics, an amateur
violinist, and a vegetarian who saw animals as bearing a "near
relation" to humans. He would know him as a husband and father
(unlike Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kant). He would know that Hartley
was often in extreme pain, and in danger of losing his life, as he
still suffered grievously from bladder stones. And he would know him
to be a man with deeply unconventional religious beliefs.



Picking up the *Observations*, such a reader would see that the
book presented itself as Newtonian science--through the use of
"Observations" in the title (compare two groundbreaking
scientific texts, Franklin's *Experiments and Observations on
Electricity*, 1751, and Priestley's *Experiments and
Observations of Different Kinds of Air*, 1774), and through the
geometrical format of propositions and corollaries that structure the
text. Were he to page through the opening sections, he would see that
the Hartley wrote for a reader already familiar with technical
concepts in, for example, anatomy and physiology, and in the
speculative physics in Newton's *Opticks.*



Were the reader to continue beyond the opening propositions of the
*Observations*, he would encounter elements of another, older
tradition: references to "perfect self-annihilation, and the
pure love of God" (*OM* 2, prop. 67), and quotations of
select biblical passages, especially the promise of becoming
"partakers of the divine nature" (2 Pet. 1.4). These place
Hartley within the realms of pietism and mysticism.



Specifically, they are expressions of the "everlasting
gospel" of universal salvation. For the *Observations*
envisions the restoration of a fallen, fragmented, and self-alienated
humanity to "perfect manhood," in which all people,
without exception, will be "members of the mystical body of
Christ," and as such will become "new sets of senses, and
perceptive powers, to each other, so as to increase each others
happiness without limits" (*OM* 2, prop. 68; cf. prop.
35).



Neither the scientific approach to "man" nor the
affirmation of universal salvation was in itself original. One could
find the former in the medical literature, and in Descartes. For
versions of the "everlasting gospel" one could turn to
various writers, including Peter Sterry, Cromwell's chaplain, in
*A Discourse of the Freedom of the Will* (1675), Sterry's
fellow chaplain to Cromwell, Jeremiah White, in *The Restoration of
All Things* (1712), the visionary Jane Lead, the mathematician
Thomas Bayes, in *Divine Benevolence* (1731), and, on the
continent, Charles Hector de Marsay.



What is distinctive about Hartley's *Observations* is the
simultaneous presence of the two approaches. Although Hartley affirms
that the whole person is a "mechanism," subject to
scientific study, he is no French atheist, no La Mettrie (author of
the notorious *L'Homme machine*, 1748), but a person of
deep religious sensibility. Similarly, Hartley affirms universal
restoration--but with none of the hallucinatory mysticism of Lead
or Marsay. Rather, the doctrine is supported by an application of the
latest scientific thinking.



Consider the full title: *Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty,
and his Expectations.* Hartley attempts a synthesis, by showing
that bodily "frame," moral "duty," and
religious "expectations" all converge on the same
point--and that point is the overcoming of the chasm between hell
and heaven. Recall that Hartley, like other Unitarians, believed the
divinity of Jesus and substitutionary atonement to be doctrines that
obscured the original light of Christianity. Thus an explanation of
"salvation" as something external and undeserved has no
part in his thinking. Rather, he offers a scientific account of how we
are framed, both physically and psychologically, so as ultimately to
attain the state in which we are all be "partakers of the divine
nature, loving and lovely, holy and happy" (*OM* 2, prop.
56).


## 3. The Science of Man



The scientific dimension of the *Observations* is in part
methodical and in part substantive. As a matter of method, Hartley
proposes the scientific investigation of "man." As noted
above, this is not unique; physicians had been doing just this for
decades, and there were also the examples of Descartes's
*Passions of the Soul* (1649) and *Treatise on Man*
(1664), and of Hume's anonymously published *Treatise of
Human Nature* (1739-40). (There is no evidence that Hartley
knew anything about Hume, or Hume about Hartley.) What is distinctive
about the *Observations* is that it extends Newtonian science
to the study of human nature.



We should assume, Hartley writes, that the body's
"component particles" are "subjected to the same
subtle laws" (*OM* 1, prop. 9) as are all other material
entities. The subtle laws are those Newton suggested in the
"Queries" to his *Opticks*, and which Stephen Hales
(1677-1761, remembered today as the father of plant physiology
and for the measurement of blood pressure) further developed in the
chemical theory in his *Statical Essays*--i.e.,
*Vegetable Staticks* (1727) and *Haemastaticks* (1733).
Descartes had earlier proposed a model of neural physiology, but in
1740s Britain the physics the model depended upon would have looked
out of date. Hartley, in contrast, presented a "theory of
vibrations" that explained how the "component
particles" that constitute the nerves and brain interact with
the physical universe suggested by Newton--a world composed of
"forces of attraction and repulsion" and having a minimum
of solid matter.



As a matter of substance, Hartley proposes:



> 
> Since therefore sensations are conveyed to the mind, by the efficiency
> of corporeal causes ... it seems to me, that the powers of
> generating ideas, and raising them by association, must also arise
> from corporeal causes, and consequently admit of an explication from
> the subtle influences of the small parts of matter on each other, as
> soon as these are sufficiently understood. (*OM* 1, prop. 11)
> 



Note the language: "corporeal causes"
"generate" and "raise" ideas "by
association." Unlike later "association
psychologists" such as James Mill, Hartley does not start with
"ideas" as subjective entities already experientially
present to the "mind" and then ask how these are linked.
Rather, he starts with bodily, specifically neurological processes,
and asks: how do such processes generate and raise our perceptions,
emotions, thoughts, and actions? This is a proposal for neuroscience,
not a version of philosophical or psychological
"empiricism."



If the responses of a nervous system to its physical environment can
generate and raise one "idea," one flash of consciousness,
they can generate any, and all. Thus "the whole superstructure
of ideas and associations observable in human life may ... be
built upon as small a foundation as we please" (*OM* 1,
prop. 11). For Hartley, the foundation is simple: nerves
"vibrate" (on a molecular level, not as violin strings),
change their frequencies or amplitudes of vibration, and transmit
those changes to other nerves. But thanks to the vast number of
associative connections between nerves and within the brain, this
fundamental mechanism generates all the complexities of action we
observe in living beings--both animal and human.



The first volume of the *Observations* ends with a bold
statement: if an organism "could be endued with the most simple
kinds of sensation, [it] might also arrive at all that intelligence of
which the human mind is possessed" (*OM* 1,
Conclusion).



Such is an expression of the "error ... deeper and more
fundamental than any other" with which Mackintosh charged
Hartley: that of overlooking ontological dualism, "the
primordial and perpetual distinction between the being that thinks and
the thing which is thought of" (1836, 245). Descartes maintained
this distinction by positing a substance dualism of mind and body (and
by treating animals as "mere" mechanisms, without
consciousness, and humans as rational, sentient beings), and such as
Hume and later James Mill respected it (or at least avoided dealing
with it) by writing about the contents of conscious minds while
keeping well clear of neurophysiology. But Hartley ignores the
distinction between "thinking" and "thought
of"; he affirms that neurological processes generate
consciousness.



In Hartley's view, animals are conscious beings, endued with
sensation and, in neurologically complex species, their own kinds of
intelligence: hence he affirms their "near relation" to
us--which obligates us "to be their guardians and
benefactors," and is reason to refrain from making them suffer
for our sport or convenience, and from killing them for food
(*OM* 1, prop. 93; cf. *OM* 2, prop. 52).What separates
us from animals are simply differences in neuro-anatomy.



Accept that "all that intelligence of which the human mind is
possessed"could be arrived at by an organism possessing
"the most simple kinds of sensation," and what follows? To
many, a line of thought "involving all nature into darkness and
confusion." To others, with Priestley, the way of
"entering upon a new world" of scientific discovery, free
of the dualism of spirit and matter.


## 4. Perception and Action: The Role of "Joint Impression"



Hartley's starting point is the living organism, and
specifically the physical "vibrations" present in brain
and nervous system and in the universe with which the organism
interacts. From this starting point, two important considerations
follow. The first is that sensations and ideas are products, not
givens, and their "generation" and "raising"
require explanation. The second involves the recognition that
organisms are active beings. Like other animals, humans move about in,
explore, and interact with their environments. What is more, humans
become adept at performing various kinds of learned, highly skilled
actions--e.g., playing the violin. The "ideas" humans
have largely occur within, and guide, such practices.



Concerning the first consideration: although "association"
is a central concept in the *Observations*, it is not primarily
a name for the process by which discrete experiential entities link
up; rather, the process of neurological association generates ideas,
including our categories of perception. In proposition 11, Hartley
states that "ideas, and miniature vibrations, must first be
generated ... before they can be associated." He adds:



> 
> But then (which is very remarkable) this power of forming ideas, and
> their corresponding miniature vibrations, does equally presuppose the
> power of association. For since all sensations and vibrations are
> infinitely divisible, in respect of time and place, they could not
> leave any traces or images of themselves, i.e. any ideas, or miniature
> vibrations, unless their infinitesimal parts did cohere together
> through joint impression, i.e. association. (*OM* 1, prop. 11)
> 



By stating that "all sensations and vibrations are infinitely
divisible," Hartley is elaborating on a point made by George
Berkeley, in his *Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision* ([1709]
1948), that a being born "blind" to bodily feeling and
possessing only sight would have no concept of space and would be
unable to perceive a geometrically ordered world. To such a being,
sensations would be "infinitely"--i.e.,
arbitrarily--divisible. No stable, repeatable "ideas"
could arise from them.



Hartley also agrees with Berkeley's solution to this problem: we
perceive a coherent world thanks to the generation of
"ideas" (cognitive, semantic, and pragmatic responses to
the world) through the "joint impression" of sensations
from distinct sensory modalities--sight, hearing, and especially
touch. As does Berkeley, Hartley identifies feeling or touch as
"the fundamental source of information in respect of the
essential properties of matter" and "our first and
principle key to the knowledge of the external world"
(*OM* 1, prop. 30). Thus, Hartley writes, "we call the
touch the reality, light the representative." The sense of sight
"may be considered, agreeably to Bishop Berkeley's remark,
as a philosophical language for the ideas of feeling" (see
Berkeley [1709] 1948, sections 6.4, 6.8, and 9.4).



A "philosophical language" is one "without any
deficiency, superfluity, or equivocation" (*OM* 1, prop.
83), and what makes sight a "philosophical language" for
feeling is that the two match each other: "The same qualities
are made by means of light to impress vibrations on our eyes, which
correspond in great measure to those made on the sense of feeling, so
as to vary with their varieties" (*OM* 1, prop. 30).
Feeling and vision flow in tandem, with no missing, extraneous, or
equivocal moves. It is thus joint impression, the correlation of the
flows of sensation through two (or more) sensory modalities, so that
the sensations one "vary with the varieties" of another,
that accounts for the fact that we have ideas at all.



In contrast, a person whose visual inputs are dissociated from his
other sensory modalities, and especially his own movement and feeling,
is unable to consistently identify any "visual ideas."
Such is the condition of a person suffering from a visual agnosia (see
James 1890, 1:48-50).



This first consideration thus naturally leads to the second, for both
Hartley, and Berkeley before him, are talking about the actions of an
embodied being. A living being's capacities for sensory
discrimination, feature detection, and perceptual categorization are
all involved with the repertoires of action that being performs,
either innately or through learning.



For many animals, the ways in which physical movements vary with the
varieties of visual cues is relatively fixed: cats pounce on mice
(some of cloth), and swat at moths (or moving shadows on a sunlit
wall). For human beings, thanks to the brain's plasticity in
forming "joint impressions," there are many ways in which
the "varieties" of one sensation "vary with the
varieties" of another: at the sight of notes on a staff, fingers
move determinately upon a piano keyboard. Expert musicians, at the
sight of the notes, hear the tune in their mind's ear.



But how to explain what it is that the expert musician (or any expert
practitioner) does? And how does one learn to do this?


## 5. The Range of Actions: From "Automatic" to "Decomplex"



In the *Observations*, Hartley offers a conceptually novel
treatment of physical action--a topic largely absent from other
treatises, or inquiries, devoted to "human nature" or
"human understanding." Even in James Mill's
*Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind*, a work with an
acknowledged debt to Hartley, bodily action is touched on only in the
last chapter of the book, on "The Will." But to an
attentive "observer of man," it should be obvious that we
live by doing, by performing tasks that depend on repertoires of
perfected movement, some (like walking) mastered in infancy, others
(like typing) later in life.



Hartley invented to two words to describe physical movements:
"automatic" and "decomplex."



Hartley formed the adjective "automatic" from an existing
noun, "automaton," to describe movements such as
"the motions of the heart, and the peristaltic motion of the
bowels" (*OM* 1, Introduction). Such "originally
automatic" motions are homeostatic: As a heart beats, the
alternation of contraction and relaxation is maintained and modified
in response to the needs and experiences of the organism (*OM*
1, prop. 19).



Following the discussion of "originally automatic" motion
is this theorem: "If any sensation A, idea B, or motion C, be
associated ... with any other sensation D, idea E, or muscular
motion F, it will, at last, excite d, the simple idea belonging to
sensation D, the very idea E, or the very muscular motion F"
(*OM* 1, prop. 20). Through the physical association or neural
impulses in the brain, any sensation, idea, or muscular motion can
become the stimulus that excites any other idea or muscular motion.
One's heart beats faster at the sight, sound, or thought of
something one has learned to fear.



The formation of such novel associations of stimuli to physiological
responses means that "originally automatic" motions can
transform into motions that are "voluntary" or
"secondarily automatic" (*OM* 1, prop. 21).



An action is voluntary when its stimulus is an "idea, or state
of mind ... which we term the will" (*OM* 1, prop.
21). To illustrate how ideas of the form "the will to
..." derive from "originally automatic"
motions, Hartley describes how a child gains motor control over parts
and functions of her body. "Originally automatic" motions
are brought under control through a series of substitutions of the
initiating stimulus. An infant grasps the finger placed in her palm,
and then the toy she sees, and then grasps at "the sound of the
words grasp, take hold, &c., the sight of the nurse's hand,
in that state, the idea of a hand, and particularly the child's
own hand." These and "innumerable other associated
circumstances ... will put the child upon grasping, till, at
last, that idea, or state of mind which we may call the will to grasp,
is generated and sufficiently associated with the action to produce it
instantaneously."



It is important to note that, in Hartley's account, the
performance of a voluntary movement is not a dualistic, two-stage
process, with an executive "faculty" of the Mind, the
Will, first issuing an instruction that the body then carries out.
Rather, a movement becomes voluntary through the living being's
interaction with the "innumerable ... associated
circumstances" of its environment, which interactions bring
about a series of substitutions of the initiating stimulus. In this
light, "will" does not name anything substantive: it is a
word we use to describe an "idea, or state of mind." And
it is a word people often use to express bafflement as to what this
"state of mind" amounts to. Hartley notes that adults
start calling a child willful at the time he learns to walk, because
"the child, in some cases, does not walk when desired, whilst
yet the circumstances are apparently the same as when he does. For
here the unapparent cause of walking, or not walking, is
*will*" (*OM* 1, prop. 77). But, he adds, "a
careful observation ... will always shew ... that when
children do different things, the real circumstances, natural or
associated, are proportionally different, and that the state of mind
called will depends on the difference."



Sequences of substitutions transform originally automatic actions into
voluntary ones. Hartley recognizes that the process continues, so that
voluntary actions in turn become what he terms "secondarily
automatic":



> 
> After the actions, which are most perfectly voluntary, have been
> rendered so by one set of associations, they may, by another, be made
> to depend upon the most diminutive sensations, ideas, and motions,
> such as the mind scarce regards, or is conscious of; and which it can
> therefore scarce recollect the moment after the action is over. Hence
> it follows, that association not only converts automatic actions into
> voluntary, but voluntary ones into automatic. For these actions
> ... are rather to be ascribed to the body than the mind, i.e. are
> to be referred to the head of automatic motions. I shall call them
> automatic motions of the secondary kind, to distinguish them from
> those which are originally automatic, and from the voluntary ones.
> (*OM* 1, prop. 21)
> 



Think of learning to type or play the piano. At first one develops a
repertoire of voluntary motions. But fluency requires that the motions
be secondarily automatic.



To his critics, notably Reid and the later Coleridge, Hartley's
commitment to "mechanism" impeached the "freedom of
the will" and hence moral responsibility. But where such critics
were intent on affirming the adult self's executive control over
thought and action, Hartley's concern is the opposite: he starts
with the infant and asks, How does a child gain control of the
originally automatic processes present in infancy? Gain motor control
of her hands? Learn to walk, and dance? Play a musical instrument?
Transform spontaneous burbling and crying into articulate speech?
Hartley's critics accuse him of reducing the human being to a
"mere mechanism." But from a Hartleian perspective, the
"mechanism" of "secondarily automatic" actions
is an achievement, not a given--and a necessary achievement, if
one is to live a complete human life.



Most human competencies, though voluntarily performed, rely upon
extensive repertoires of secondarily automatic actions. Such
performances are not prespecified and inflexible routines. When people
play music, they add flourishes, and improvise if they are
sufficiently skilled. When they do so, the actions they perform are
what Hartley calls "decomplex."



Readers of the *Observations* would have been familiar with the
words "decompound" and
"decomposite"--both from the late Latin
*decompositus*, a rendering of the Greek
*parasynthetos*--in which the "de-" prefix
signifies "repeatedly" or "further." They
would also know the word "complex," from Locke's
*Essay concerning Human Understanding*: "Ideas thus made
up of several simple ones put together, I call Complex; such as are
Beauty, Gratitude, a Man, an Army, the Universe" (Locke [1690]
1975, 2.12.1).



Available to Hartley were both Locke's distinction between
"simple" and "complex" and also instances in
which the de- prefix meant "further." On the analogy of
"compound" to "decompound," he wrote of ideas
and actions being either "complex" or
"decomplex." In Hartley's theory, the associations
in a complex action or idea are synchronic, while the associations in
a decomplex action or idea are diachronic. In playing a piano, hitting
the D key at the sight of the printed note D is a complex movement,
while playing a composition is a decomplex action.



The elements of a secondarily automatic, complex movement are tightly
fused. In contrast, those in a decomplex action or idea are more
loosely associated (*OM* 1, prop. 12); this looseness makes it
possible to include a repertoire of secondarily automatic movements in
a variety of decomplex ones--the same notes in an endless number
of tunes. Hartley also observes that people find it impossible to
perform decomplex actions--play a tune, say a
sentence--backward.



Decomplex actions draw on different kinds of complex movements,
involving the association of movements with perceptions in one or more
sensory modalities: at the sight of the notes on the staff, or the
sound of the tones, the pianist hits the keys. As a person becomes
proficient at a type of decomplex action, the guiding sensory modality
can change. When learning to dance, Hartley observes, at first
"the scholar desires to look at his feet and legs, in order to
judge by seeing when they are in a proper position," but
"by degrees he learns to judge of this by feeling"
(*OM* 1, prop. 77). Similarly, a practiced musician plays the
harpsichord from "the connexion of the several complex parts of
the decomplex motions" (*OM* 1, prop. 21). One's
hands know the tune.



Hartley improvised with language in order to articulate a new
understanding of human action. Use of the one word became ...
automatic. The other never made it into circulation. In a world in
which "decompose" means "to rot," it was
doomed. Nonetheless, we lack a widely available word for the concept
that "decomplex" names.



Hartley's account draws particular attention to the dependency
of our capacities for intentionality, flexibility, and innovation in
our decomplex actions upon the repertoires of actions we have made
secondarily automatic. It thus centers upon a key insight: "All
our voluntary powers are of the nature of memory" (*OM*
1, prop. 90).


## 6. Language and Thought



In Hartley's account, at birth we enter the world already
humming with "originally automatic" motions. Thanks to the
activity of our brain and nerves, these motions are self-regulating
and homeostatic, responsive to bodily feedback and external stimuli.
Then, as we grow, we gain voluntary control over some of our
movements, perfect those that become secondarily automatic, and learn
to carry out decomplex actions that draw on repertoires of secondarily
automatic components.



In Hartley's account of human nature, the concept of the
"association of ideas" plays a central role. But the
paradigmatic instances of "association" are, first, the
"joint impressions" that generate "ideas"
(including complex movements), and second, the flowing cascades of
movement that are decomplex actions. Such decomplex actions are
central to the lives we lead. And foremost among decomplex actions are
the sentences we speak.



For Hartley, language is a highly "decomplex" motor
activity that involves the cementing of associations between perceived
and created sounds, and, for the literate, perceived and created
marks: "impressions made on the ear," "actions of
the organs of speech," "impressions made upon the
eye," and "actions of the hand in writing"
(*OM* 1, prop. 79). Further connections must be made between
perceived or created sounds and features of the world, especially the
actions of oneself and of other people. Hartley's approach is
nearly the opposite of Locke's, who writes as if language were a
dictionary, in which each word marks an idea known prelinguistically
to the speaker: "words being voluntary signs, they cannot be
voluntary signs imposed by [the speaker] on things he knows
not... . Till he has some ideas of his own, he cannot suppose
them to correspond with the conceptions of another man; nor can he use
any signs for them" (Locke [1690] 1975, 3.2.2).



Thus while Locke seems to be saying that individuals first have ideas,
and then turn to language to communicate them to others, Hartley
describes a process whereby, as children, we burble and cry and
listen--and gradually gain motor control of our burbling and
crying, associate it with what we hear and handle and do, and
eventually learn the meaning of what we say. Once again, the process
of association--here the activity of hearing and speaking, and
later reading and writing--generates ideas: we have ideas because
we use language, in concrete social interactions; we do not create
language to express the ideas we, as lone individuals, already
have.



In this regard, consider Hume's assertion that, if we are unsure
about the meaning of a word, "we need but enquire, *from what
impression is that supposed idea derived?*" (Hume [1748]
1975, 22), and his recommendation that we abandon words that lack such
derivations. From Hartley's point of view, this is manifestly
bad advice.



For Hartley, complex and decomplex ideas are wholes that do not
"bear any relation to [their] compounding parts."
Specifically, "the decomplex idea belonging to any sentence is
not compounded merely of the complex ideas belonging to the words in
it" (*OM* 1, prop. 12). The meaning of an utterance is a
property of the whole--of the performance of a specific decomplex
action in a social and pragmatic context. Moreover, "both
children and adults learn the ideas belonging to whole sentences many
times in a summary way, and not by adding together the ideas of the
several words in the sentence." Consequently, children and
illiterate adults find it hard to "separate sentences into the
several words which compound them" (*OM* 1, prop.
80).



Thus the meanings of sentences are not simply derivable from the
meanings of the words in them, and the meanings of those words are not
derivable from the "impressions" to which they refer. When
children begin to speak, they utter "sentences" that,
though short (*Mommy!*) are whole, complete, and meaningful
expressions. It is only when they learn to read that they realize
sentences are composed of individual words. Over time, the sentences
increase in decomplexity, as people participate in the activities of
life. As adults, people speak a vast variety of highly decomplex
expressions--including, for example, those involved in the
practice of a science, or a religion.


## 7. Language as Algebra



Given that meaning is a property of complete expressions, Hartley is
quick to point out that individual words often lack definite, shared
meanings. Such indefiniteness is, in Hartley's view, hardly a
defect, but rather a valuable feature of language. Hartley writes that
language is "one species of algebra," and algebra
"nothing more than the language ... peculiarly fitted to
explain quantity of all kinds" (*OM* 1, 80).



The algebraic quality of language is especially important in
scientific practice. Like *x* and *y* in algebra,
scientific terms, such as Hartley's "vibrations" or
contemporary physicists' "particles," stand for
unknowns, for which vibrating strings or grains of sand provide only
loose and misleading analogies. Their presence is necessary for the
practice of scientific discovery. Scientists employ
"algebraic" terms in order to discern correlations and
patterns that might otherwise remain unobserved: "Bringing an
unknown quantity into a relation answers, in philosophy, to the art of
giving names, expressing nothing definite ... and then inserting
these names ... in all the enunciations of the phenomena, to see
whether, from a comparison of these terms with each other, something
definite in manner, degree, or mutual relation might result"
(*OM* 1, prop. 87).



In such scientific practice, the more algebraic--i.e., free from
association with sense "impressions"--words are the
better. (Thus "quark" is an inspired choice.) Hume's
advice, to use only terms referring to clear
"impressions," if followed, would bring the practice of a
science to a halt.



However, to turn this around, the utility of words for unknowns
depends upon their proper use within ongoing practices. For examples
of how to conduct scientific inquiry, Hartley turns to mathematical
methods, and he includes an extensive discussion of these in
proposition 87 of volume 1 of the *Observations*, which is
titled: "To deduce Rules for the Ascertainment of Truth, and
Advancement of Knowledge, from the Mathematical Methods of considering
Quantity."



One deduction involves the comparison of scientific investigation to
the use of the rule of the false position in arithmetic: "Here a
first position is obtained, which, though not accurate, approaches,
however, to the truth. From this, applied to the equations, a second
position is deduced, which approaches nearer to the truth than the
first; from the second a third, etc." Hartley adds that
"this is indeed the way, in which advances in science are
carried on; and scientific persons are aware, that it is and must be
so" (*OM* 1, prop. 87).



"I frame no hypotheses." Thus had Newton famously written
in the *Principia.* Hartley responds directly: "It is in
vain," he writes, "to bid an inquirer form no
hypothesis" (*OM* 1, prop. 87). Remember that Hartley was
a practicing physician; on the basis of ambiguous symptoms and
fallible medical knowledge, he was every day "framing
hypotheses," making diagnoses. The question, for Hartley,
concerns the degree of confidence we may place in our hypotheses. How
do we measure how far our "first position" is from the
truth, when we don't know what the truth is? And how do we
measure the degree to which the degree of error in our second and
third positions has diminished?



In this regard, what is most interesting in proposition 87 is
Hartley's discussion of probability. Hartley appears to have
been one of a small circle of mathematicians who read, and understood,
papers making fundamental contributions to the theory of probability
by Abraham De Moivre (1667-1754) and Thomas Bayes
(1702-61). De Moivre developed a theorem that allows for the
determination of the degree of convergence between the frequency of
observed events and the underlying probability ratio, for any finite
number of events. More important is "the solution to the inverse
problem," which Hartley says "an ingenious friend"
communicated to him. This would be Bayes's
theorem--customarily attributed to Thomas Bayes--which deals
with determining the probability with which probability ratios can be
inferred from observed outcomes, and which provides (a still
controversial) foundation for statistical inference. In his discussion
of probability theory, and other mathematical topics, Hartley is
primarily interested in methods for moving from observation to
explanation, of assessing the likeliness--i.e,
believability--of hypotheses.



Hartley, like Hume, thought that belief was largely a matter of
sentiment. "Rational assent" is a matter of the strength
of the association between a sentence (or even some of the words in
it!) and the word "true" (*OM* 1, prop. 86)
"Practical assent," a person's willingness to act,
depends on the vividness the proposition--and such can even make
"an interesting event, supposed doubtful, or even fictitious,
... appear like a real one," thereby pulling rational
assent after it. (Hartley notes, dryly, "the foundation of
assent is still the same. I here describe the fact only.") But
Hartley was not content to stop here, an exponent of an urbane
skepticism. Belief and assent are matters of feeling, of sentiment,
yes--but there are mathematical ways of thinking about the
probabilities of belief. And people who think mathematically make
better physicians and scientists. (How many trials of an unproven
treatment for bladder stones does one have to run, to reach a
threshold degree of belief in the results?) In this regard, it is fair
to say that Hartley was one of the first Bayesians.



One other consequence of Hartley's practice-oriented,
"algebraic" approach to language concerns the validity of
alternate languages. In the "popular" language we use
every day, we talk of our choices, intentions, and resolutions, but in
the "philosophical" language of the *Observations*,
Hartley proposed we think in terms of "philosophical
necessity"--in which every "voluntary" action
is "excited by an associated circumstance" (*OM* 1,
70). Some people had, and have, no use for such talk: it denies the
freedom (and indeed, the existence) of the will. Hartley argues that
the use of two incommensurable languages, "popular" and
"philosophical," is not a problem, provided that we use
them separately and consistently: "insuperable difficulties will
arise" only "if we mix these languages" (OM 2, prop.
15). Both languages work, in their own contexts of practice.



Hartley had a warrant for this affirmative approach to languages in
his scientific and mathematical training: Newton wrote the
*Principia* in the language of geometry, but the
"mathematical principles of natural philosophy" could be
equally (and better?) expressed in the "algebraic"
language of the calculus--for which there were rival notations.
Similarly, Hartley championed a new "notation" for the
English language--his friend John Byrom's shorthand, which
he saw as a reform that would make our written language more closely
approximate a "philosophical" one. When he began work on
the *Observations*, he conceived of the project as
demonstrating that language about "self-interest," the
"common good," and the "will of God" were
different ways of saying the same thing. The project was thus as much
moral and religious as it was scientific.


## 8. Moral Psychology



As noted above, Hartley believed that all people will ultimately
become "partakers of the divine nature." Such is the
"everlasting gospel" of universal salvation. Moreover,
Hartley sought to show that the gathering together of all humanity
into the "mystical body of Christ" is a process inherent
in our nature: the psychological dynamic of association, which
generates our ideas and perfects our secondarily automatic movements,
also "has a tendency to reduce the state of those who have eaten
of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, back again to a
paradisiacal one" (*OM* 1, prop. 14). The question is,
how does association accomplish this?



To see how it does, we must look (1) more closely at the concept of
association, (2) at Hartley's notion of
"transference," and (3) at the series of psychological
orientations association and transference generate. And as we do so,
we should keep in mind that many of those who studied the
*Observations* in the dissenting academies appear to have
valued Hartley primarily as a moral theorist and exemplar--for,
that is, his description of the path of moral transformation. Such is
a common theme in their recollections.



(1) We noted above Hartley's collaboration with his friend
Stephen Hales to discover a medical treatment that would dissolve
bladder stones. Following Newton, Hales believed "forces of
attraction and repulsion" to be the basis of physical nature,
and through various chemical experiments he demonstrated that solid
concretions, including bladder stones, were compounds that had locked
within themselves large quantities of "air," which
normally manifests a strongly repelling force. The "air"
within a bladder stone could be released, and the stone dissolved,
through reaction with an agent that would change the pH of the urine.
Such chemicals are plentiful in the laboratory; the two men were
looking for one that a person could safely ingest.



In his *Statical Essays*, Hales proposes that "air"
is a component in many "animal, vegetable, and mineral
substances":



> 
> If all the parts of matter were only endued with a strongly attracting
> power, whole nature would then immediately become one unactive
> cohering lump; wherefore it was absolutely necessary ... that
> there should be every where intermixed with it a due proportion of
> strongly repelling elastick particles, ... [and] that these
> particles should be endued with a property of resuming their elastick
> state, . . . that thereby this beautiful frame of things might be
> maintained in a continual round of the production and dissolution of
> animal and vegetable bodies. (Hales 1769, 1:314-15)
> 



A seemingly inert particle of matter contains within itself forces of
attraction and repulsion in a dynamic equilibrium. (Hence the
readiness of the particles constituting the nerves to
"vibrate.") In such particles concretions and dissolutions
occur continuously; the materials within the bodies of living things
form, dissolve, and form again--"that thereby this
beautiful frame of things might be maintained."



Hartley extends these chemical concepts to psychology. As an analogy
to the forces of "attraction" and "repulsion,"
he writes of both "associations" and
"counter-associations" at work in generating the frame of
a person's self. The role of association is
obvious--through "joint impression," it generates
"ideas," including the complex movements that are the
basis of the decomplex actions we perform every day. And as we shall
see shortly, psychological associations form ("model") the
basic orientations of the self. But "counter-associations"
are equally vital. The counter-associations in our dreams, for
example, are "of singular use to us, by interrupting and
breaking the course of our associations. For, if we were always awake,
some accidental associations would be cemented by continuance, as that
nothing could afterwards disjoin them, which would be madness"
(*OM* 1, prop. 91). A sane mind, therefore, is one
"maintained in a continual round of the production and
dissolution"--in, that is, a dynamic balance of connection
and detachment, memory and forgetting, that holds out the possibility
of change and transformation.



(2) We noted in the discussion of action that, in Hartley's
theory, a child gains voluntary control over his body through a series
of substitutions. A similar series of substitutions, or
"transferences" of emotion, are at work in the formation
of a person's character. For example, Hartley offers a
fascinating, detailed account of how the spontaneous gesture by which
a frightened, abused child raises his hand to ward off a blow becomes,
through a series of such transferences, the blow the abusing adult
directs in anger at a helpless child (*OM* 1, prop. 97). Here,
the links by which fear is transferred, and transmuted into anger,
include the situational, symbolic, and semantic: from, for example,
being struck to the "signs and tokens" of an impending
beating--e.g., the bottle of gin, or the words of abuse and
affection, the curses and kisses, that attend drunkenness.



(3) Hartley offers an original model of psychological development. The
various emotional states ("pleasures and pains") we
experience structure themselves into "six classes":
imagination, ambition, self-interest, sympathy, theopathy, and the
moral sense. These form two groups of three, each consisting of two
basic orientations and a means of regulating them.



The first group consists of imagination, the orientation toward
objects as sources of pleasure or displeasure, and of ambition,
whereby pleasure or pain derive from one's awareness of
one's standing in the eyes of others. In this group
self-interest is the ego, which attempts to manage and satisfy the
demands of imagination and ambition. The second group combines
sympathy, the orientation of personal intersubjectivity, and
theopathy, the person's relationship with what the person takes
to be the divine. ("Theopathy" appears to be
Hartley's invention.) Hartley calls the moral sense (a term then
in widespread use) the "monitor" of sympathy and
theopathy; it is a higher ego, or self, beyond the ego.



The psychological structure the groups represent is epigenetic and
transformative. Like the accounts of twentieth-century psychologists
such as Maslow, Erikson, and Kohlberg, Hartley's theory
describes a process of moral development as a sequence of
transformations of the self.



The process is epigenetic in that the earlier orientations
"model" the orientations that follow them. A young child,
for example, enjoys a pleasure of imagination when playing with new
toys; but when that pleasure transfers to the status that derives from
being perceived by others to be a (good) child who has a collection of
prized toys, the child is now experiencing a pleasure of ambition. And
imagination and ambition then "model" self-interest, as
the child weighs the pleasures and pains, benefits and costs, of
actually playing with the toys versus keeping them on the shelf for
purposes of display. The problem remains in later life, when the
pleasures of purchased objects derive more from their symbolic value
than from actual use. This is especially the case when the purchases
are made to satisfy the pleasures of ambition--of being perceived
as the kind of person who can own a Mercedes, or who is fluent in the
constantly changing idioms of fashion.



Also contributing to the epigenetic modeling of the self is the fact
that imagination, ambition, and self-interest inevitably generate
counter-associations--experiences of pain or indifference where
one anticipated pleasure. Indulgence in the pleasures of imagination,
Hartley writes, often "lead[s] men into such a degree of
solicitude, anxiety, and fearfulness, in minute affairs, as to make
them inflict upon themselves greater torments, than the most cruel
tyrant could invent" (*OM* 2, 54). Similarly with
ambition: keeping up with the "latest" fashion (in cars,
clothes, or philosophers) for the sake of winning others'
approval is hard work.



"We do, and must, upon our entrance into the world, begin with
idolatry to external things, and, as we advance in it, proceed to the
idolatry of ourselves" (*OM* 2, prop. 4). Some thus
remain, anxiously pouring their sacrifices over these concretions. In
others the inevitable, painful counter-associations act as solvents,
and cause the stony idols to disintegrate. Sympathy and theopathy
replace imagination and ambition as "primary pursuits,"
the fundamental modes of experience and interaction. Hartley calls
this reorienting transformation the "annihilation of
self."



This "annihilation" is not quasi-mystical obliteration;
rather, it is a reorientation toward, or discovery of, a higher self
of sympathy, theopathy, and the moral sense. It involves liberation
from what William Blake calls the "mind-forged manacles"
of a self-created and self-regarding hell and an awakening to
one's true humanity.



Once they are "modeled," the higher orientations
"new-model" the lower. For the person for whom sympathy
and theopathy are primary pursuits, imagination and ambition remain
modes of interaction, but modes that are transformed. Beauty may now
be perceived in people and things previously passed over with
indifference or distaste. And one's happiness, indeed
one's hopes for one's self, may be linked with the
happiness of people one previously sought to avoid.



This does not mean, for Hartley, that life gets easier. Rather he
describes the path as increasingly difficult. Although profoundly
optimistic about the ultimate future of humanity--he is
describing, after all, how association tends "to reduce the
state of those who have eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and
evil, back again to a paradisiacal one"--he is acutely
aware of the many bypaths of human self-deception and destructiveness.
He is especially conscious of the dangers facing those whose primary
pursuit concerns being sympathetic, theopathic, and morally
perceptive. Such a person can become "a bitter persecuting
spirit" (*OM* 1, prop. 97). In general, the
"higher" the level of moral and spiritual attainment, the
greater the potential for a crippling, demonic destructiveness. In
this regard, reading Hartley one encounters a vision of human nature
as deeply conflicted, struggling against itself--a view similar
to what one finds in Dostoyevsky or Kierkegaard.



Although Hartley identifies "sympathy" and
"theopathy" as basic orientations, the orientations do not
necessarily have a positive content. Hartley does not claim that
everyone is kind to others, or loves God. In some, these modes are
pathological, and theopathy is often only rudimentarily developed. In
discussing the "associations [that] may be observed in fact to
be heaped upon" the word *God*, he observes that these
begin with the "compound fictitious idea" children form
when they "suppose [God] to stand for a man whom they have never
seen" and that they end, for many people, when this idea
"is quite obliterated, without anything of a stable precise
nature succeeding in its room" (*OM* 1, prop. 98). Many
adults live with feelings of fear, aversion, boredom, and sometimes an
ardent longing, directed at a blankness--a mental picture, from
which the central image has been effaced.



Hartley's model of the self in terms of imagination, ambition,
and self-interest, and then of sympathy, theopathy, and the moral
sense, is dynamically complex. In his moral psychology, emotions are
like electrical charges that easily jump from one object, symbol,
word, or thought to another. Through such "transferences"
of emotion, the six orientations develop content; like physical
concretions, they coalesce, as emotional energies are bonded together.
And when the energy in one is sufficiently strong, the orientation
becomes the person's "primary pursuit": it demands
accretion of pleasure.



Still, the model is not static, with the self fossilizing into
"one unactive cohering lump." Thanks to the interplay of
associations and counter-associations, the six orientations both
"model" and "new-model" each other.
Psychological bodies are, as Hales said of vegetable and animal bodies,
in "a continual round of the production and
dissolution"--until such time, Hartley believed, as when
all shall discover their identity in that "mystical body"
in which "all have an equal care for each other's
[happiness]; all increase in love, and come to their *full
stature*, to perfect manhood, *by that which every joint
supplieth*" (*OM* 2, prop. 68; cf. Ephesians
4.16).