La même évidence nous accompagne dans notre deuxième principe, de la liberté de l’imagination à transposer et à changer ses idées. Les fables que nous rencontrons dans les poésies et les romans le mettent entièrement hors de question. La nature est ici totalement confondue, et ce n’est que chevaux ailés, dragons enflammés, et géants monstrueux. Et cette liberté de la fantaisie ne semblera pas étrange, si nous considérons que toutes nos idées sont copiées de nos impressions, et qu’il n’y a pas deux impressions qui soient parfaitement inséparables. Sans compter que c’est une conséquence évidente de la division des idées en simples et complexes. Partout où l’imagination perçoit une différence entre les idées, elle peut facilement produire une séparation.
SECTION IV.
Of îhe 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 wou’d 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 wou’d join them ; and ‘tis 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 intro- duces another. This uniting principle among ideas is not to be consider’d 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 faculy: 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
