Francis Hutcheson is among the important but neglected figures who contributed to the historical development of the concept of the association of ideas. Although Hutcheson's influence on that development has been acknowledged, nothing is known of the sources of his ideas. It is argued that inasmuch as his views differed from those of John Locke, they were derived from the aesthetic writings of Joseph Addison—although Hutcheson was not initially aware of this debt. It was not until Hutcheson wrote the Reflections upon Laughter that he recognized the similarity between his own views and those which Addison had expressed 13 years earlier in his Spectator papers on the pleasures of the imagination.
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