He uses indeed the word kinaeseis, to
express what we call representations or ideas, but he carefully
distinguishes them from material motion, designating the latter always
by annexing the words en topo, or kata topon. On the contrary, in his
treatise De Anima, he excludes place and motion from all the
operations of thought, whether representations or volitions, as
attributes utterly and absurdly heterogeneous.
The general law of association, or, more accurately, the common
condition under which all exciting causes act, and in which they may
be generalized, according to Aristotle is this. Ideas by having been
together acquire a power of recalling each other; or every partial
representation awakes the total representation of which it had been a
part. In the practical determination of this common principle to
particular recollections, he admits five agents or occasioning causes:
first, connection in time, whether simultaneous, preceding, or
successive; second, vicinity or connection in space; third,
interdependence or necessary connection, as cause and effect; fourth,
likeness; and fifth, contrast. As an additional solution of the
occasional seeming chasms in the continuity of reproduction he proves,
that movements or ideas possessing one or the other of these five
characters had passed through the mind as intermediate links,
sufficiently clear to recall other parts of the same total impressions
with which they had co-existed, though not vivid enough to excite that
degree of attention which is requisite for distinct recollection, or
as we may aptly express it, after consciousness.
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