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THE TRUTH
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15-ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS
Ideas may be simple or complex, in respect of their contents or implication, though they are all simple in respect of their substantive basis.
Complex ideas are analysable into simpler elements, but not breakable into parts. For a broken up idea will only be so much nonsense. I can destroy the paper on which I am writing this moment, but it is impossible for me or for any one else for the whole of the living and dead nature put together—to destroy the conscious counterpart of it in the mind! The truth is that an idea is as incapable of being destroyed as it is of being created or manufactured.
Complex ideas are not formed by the additions of parts to an existing idea; they exist in the mind and are called out like simple ones. Suppose a girl is going to dress up a doll. She takes first of all only a naked doll in her hand, when her mind is also seized of the idea of that particular doll in the state of nudity. She next slips an undervest on the doll. Now, outside, in the world of matter and force, the doll remains the same; but in the mind the first doll is completely gone, and an entirely new one has taken its place, ready dressed in an undervest and resembling the girl's doll as perfectly as the first one. Thus each time that a garment
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