mind might safely be trusted to produce others too; and that those habitual associations which further thought may also come from the same mechanical source as those which hinder it. Hartley accordingly suggested habit as a sufficient explanation of all connections of our thoughts, and in so doing planted himself squarely upon the properly psychological aspect of the problem of connection, and sought to treat both rational and irrational connections from a single point of view.
The problem which he essayed, however lamely, to answer, was that of the connection between our psychic states considered purely as such, regardless of the objective connections of which they might take cognizance. How does a man come, after thinking of A, to think of B the next moment? or how does he come to think A and B always together?
These were the phenomena which Hartley undertook to explain by cerebral physiology. I believe that he was, in many essential respects, on the right track, and I propose simply to revise his conclusions by the aid of distinctions which he did not make.
But the whole historic doctrine of psychological association is tainted with one huge error--that of the construction of our thoughts out of the confounding of themselves together of immutable and incessantly recurring 'simple ideas.' It is the cohesion of these which the 'principles of association' are considered to account for. In Chapters VI and IX we saw abundant reasons for treating the doctrine of simple ideas or psychic atoms as mythological; and, in all that follows, our problem will be to keep whatever truths the associationist doctrine has caught sight of without weighing it down with the untenable incumbrance that the association is between 'ideas.'
* * * * * _Association_, so far as the word stands for an _effect, is between_ THINGS THOUGHT OF--_it is_ THINGS, _not ideas, which are associated in the mind._ We ought to talk of the association of _objects_, not of the association of _ideas_. And so far as association stands for a _cause_, it is between _processes in the brain_--it is these which, by being associated in certain ways, determine what successive objects shall be thought. Let us proceed towards our final generalizations by surveying first a few familiar facts.
* * * * * The laws of motor habit in the lower centres of the nervous system are disputed by no one. A series of movements repeated in a certain order tend to unroll themselves with peculiar ease in that order for ever afterward. Number one awakens number two, and that awakens number three, and so on, till the last is produced. A habit of this kind once become inveterate may go on automatically. And so it is with the objects with which our thinking is concerned. With some persons each note of a melody, heard but once, will accurately revive in its proper sequence. Small boys at school learn the inflections of many a Greek noun, adjective, or verb, from the reiterated recitations of the upper classes falling on their ear as they sit at their desks. All this happens with no voluntary effort on their part and with no thought of the spelling of the words. The doggerel rhymes which children use in their games, such as the formula "Ana mana mona mike Barcelona bona strike," used for 'counting out,' form another familiar example of things heard in sequence cohering in the same order in the memory.
In touch we have a smaller number of instances, though probably every one who bathes himself in a certain fixed manner is familiar with the fact that each part of his body over which the water is squeezed from the sponge awakens a premonitory tingling consciousness in that portion of skin which is habitually the next to be deluged. Tastes and smells form no very habitual series in our experience. But even if they did, it is doubtful whether habit would fix the order of their reproduction quite so well as it does that of other sensations. In vision, however, we have a sense in which the order of reproduced things is very nearly as much influenced by habit as is the order of remembered sounds.
Rooms, landscapes, buildings, pictures, or persons with whose look we are very familiar, surge up before the mind's eye with all the details of their appearance complete, so soon as we think of any one of their component parts. Some persons, in reciting printed matter by heart, will seem to see each successive word, before they utter it, appear in its order on an imaginary page. A certain chess-player, one of those heroes who train themselves to play several games at once blindfold, is reported to say that in bed at night after a match the games are played all over again before his mental eye, each board being pictured as passing in turn through each of its successive stages. In this case, of course, the intense previous voluntary strain of the power of visual representation is what facilitated the fixed order of revival.
Association occurs as amply between impressions of different senses as between homogeneous sensations. Seen things and heard things cohere with each other, and with odors and tastes, in representation, in the same order in which they cohered as impressions of the outer world.
Feelings of contact reproduce similarly the sights, sounds, and tastes with which experience has associated them. In fact, the 'objects' of our perception, as trees, men, houses, microscopes, of which the real world seems composed, are nothing but clusters of qualities which through simultaneous stimulation have so coalesced that the moment one is excited actually it serves as a sign or cue for the idea of the others to arise. Let a person enter his room in the dark and grope among the objects there. The touch of the matches will instantaneously recall their appearance. If his hand comes in contact with an orange on the table, the golden yellow of the fruit, its savor and perfume will forthwith shoot through his mind. In passing the hand over the sideboard or in jogging the coal-scuttle with the foot, the large glossy dark shape of the one and the irregular blackness of the other awaken like a flash and constitute what we call the recognition of the objects. The voice of the violin faintly echoes through the mind as the hand is laid upon it in the dark, and the feeling of the garments or draperies which may hang about the room is not _understood_ till the look correlative to the feeling has in each case been resuscitated.
Smells notoriously have the power of recalling the other experiences in whose company they were wont to be felt, perhaps long years ago; and the voluminous emotional character assumed by the images which suddenly pour into the mind at such a time forms one of the staple topics of popular psychologic wonder-- "Lost and gone and lost and gone!
Desolate sweetness--far and far away."
We cannot hear the din of a railroad tram or the yell of its whistle, without thinking of its long, jointed appearance and its headlong speed, nor catch a familiar voice in a crowd without recalling, with the name of the speaker, also his face. But the most notorious and important case of the mental combination of auditory with optical impressions originally experienced together is furnished by language.
The child is offered a new and delicious fruit and is at the same time told that it is called a 'fig.' Or looking out of the window he exclaims, "What a funny horse!" and is told that it is a 'piebald' horse. When learning his letters, the sound of each is repeated to him whilst its shape is before his eye. Thenceforward, long as he may live, he will never see a fig, a piebald horse, or a letter of the alphabet without the name which he first heard in conjunction with each clinging to it in his mind; and inversely he will never hear the name without the faint arousal of the image of the object.[465] THE RAPIDITY OF ASSOCIATION.
Reading exemplifies this kind of cohesion even more beautifully. It is an uninterrupted and protracted recall of sounds by sights which have always been coupled with them in the past. I find that I can name six hundred letters in two minutes on a printed page. Five distinct acts of association between sight and sound (not to speak of all the other processes concerned) must then have occurred in each second in my mind.
In reading entire words the speed is much more rapid. Valentin relates in his Physiology that the reading of a single page of the proof, containing 2629 letters, took him 1 minute and 32 seconds. In this experiment each letter was _understood_ in 1/28 of a second, but owing to the integration of letters into entire words, forming each a single aggregate impression directly associated with a single acoustic image, we need not suppose as many as 28 separate associations in a sound. The figures, however, suffice to show with what extreme rapidity an actual sensation recalls its customary associates. Both in fact seem to our ordinary attention to come into the mind at once.
The time-measuring psychologists of recent days have tried their hand at this problem by more elaborate methods. Galton, using a very simple apparatus, found that the sight of an unforeseen word would awaken an associated 'idea' in about 5/6 of a second.[466] Wundt next made determinations in which the 'cue' was given by single-syllabled words called out by an assistant. The person experimented on had to press a key as soon as the sound of the word awakened an associated idea. Both word and reaction were chronographically registered, and the total time-interval between the two amounted, in four observers, to 1.009, 0.896, 1.037, and 1.154 seconds respectively. From this the simple physiological reaction-time and the time of merely identifying the word's sound (the 'apperception-time,' as Wundt calls it) must be subtracted, to get the exact time required for the associated idea to arise. These times were separately determined and subtracted. The difference, called by Wundt the _association-time_, amounted, in the same four persons, to 706, 723, 752, and 874 thousandths of a second respectively.[467] The length of the last figure is due to the fact that the person reacting (President G. S. Hall) was an American, whose associations with German words would naturally be slower than those of natives. The shortest association-time noted was when the word 'Sturm' suggested to Prof. Wundt the word 'Wind' in 0.341 second.[468]--Finally, Mr. Cattell made some interesting observations upon the association-time between the look of letters and their names.
"I pasted letters," he says, "on a revolving drum, and determined at what rate they could be read aloud as they passed by a slit in a screen." He found it to vary according as one, or more than one letter, was visible at a time through the slit, and gives half a second as about the time which it takes to see and name a single letter seen alone.
"When two or more letters are always in view, not only do the processes of seeing and naming overlap, but while the subject is seeing one letter he begins to see the ones next following, and so can read them more quickly. Of the nine persons experimented on, four could read the letters faster when five were in view at once, but were not helped by a sixth letter; three were not helped by a fifth, and two not by a fourth letter. This shows that while one idea is in the centre, two, three, or four additional ideas may be in the background of consciousness. The second letter in view shortens the time about 1/40, the third 1/60, the fourth 1/100, the fifth 1/200 sec.
"I find it takes about twice as long to read (aloud, as fast as possible) words which have no connection as words which make sentences and letters which have no connection as letters which make words.
When the words make sentences and the letters words, not only do the processes of seeing and naming overlap, but by one mental effort the subject can recognize a whole group of words or letters, and by one will-act choose the motions to be made in naming, so that the rate at which the words and letters are read is really only limited by the maximum rapidity at which the speech-organs can be moved. As the result of a large number of experiments, the writer found that he had read words not making sentences at the rate of 1/4 sec, words making sentences (a passage from Swift) at the rate of 1/8 sec., per word...The rate at which a person reads a foreign language is proportional to his familiarity with the language. For example, when reading as fast as possible the writer's rate was, English 138, French 167, German 250, Italian 327, Latin 434, and Greek 484; the figures giving the thousandths of a second taken to read each word. Experiments made on others strikingly confirm these results. The subject does not know that he is reading the foreign language more slowly than his own; this explains why foreigners seem to talk so fast. This simple method of determining a person's familiarity with a language might be used in school examinations.
"The time required to see and name colors and pictures of objects was determined in the same way. The time was found to be about the same (over 1/2 sec.) for colors as for pictures, and about twice as long as for words and letters. Other experiments I have made show that we can recognize a single color or picture in a slightly shorter time than a word or letter, but take longer to name it. This is because, in the case of words and letters, the association between the idea and name has taken place so often that the process has become automatic, whereas in the case of colors and pictures we must by a voluntary effort choose the name."[469] In later experiments Mr. Cattell studied the time for various associations to be performed, the termini (i.e., cue and answer) being words. A word in one language was to call up its equivalent in another, the name of an author the tongue in which he wrote, that of a city the country in which it lay, that of a writer one of his works, etc. The mean variation from the average is very great in all these experiments; and the interesting feature which they show is the existence of certain constant differences between associations of different sorts.
Thus: From _country_ to _city_, Mr. C.'s time was 0.340 sec.
From _season_ to _month_, Mr. C.'s time was 0.399 From _language_ to _author_, Mr. C.'s time was 0.523 From _author_ to _work_, Mr. C.'s time was 0.596 The average time of two observers, experimenting on eight different types of association, was 0.420 and 0.436 sec. respectively.[470] The very wide range of variation is undoubtedly a consequence of the fact that the words used as cues, and the different types of association studied, differ much in their degree of familiarity.
"For example, B is a teacher of mathematics; C has busied himself more with literature. C knows quite as well as B that 7 + 5 = 12, yet he needs 1/10 a second longer to call it to mind; B knows quite as well as C that Dante was a poet, but needs 1/20 of a second longer to think of it. Such experiments lay bare the mental life in a way that is startling and not always gratifying."[471] THE LAW OF CONTIGUITY.
Time-determinations apart, the facts we have run over can all be summed up in the simple statement that _objects once experienced together tend to become associated in the imagination, so that when any one of them is thought of, the others are likely to be thought of also, in the same order of sequence or coexistence as before_. This statement we may name the law of _mental association by contiguity_.[472] I preserve this name in order to depart as little as possible from tradition, although Mr. Ward's designation of the process as that of association by _continuity_[473] or Wundt's as that of _external_ association (to distinguish it from the _internal_ association which we shall presently learn to know under the name of association by similarity)[474] are perhaps better terms. Whatever we name the law, since it expresses merely a phenomenon of mental _habit, the most natural way of accounting for it is to conceive it as a result of the laws of habit in the nervous system; in other words, it is to ascribe it to a physiological cause._ If it be truly a law of those nerve-centres which co-ordinate sensory and motor processes together that paths once used for coupling any pair of them are thereby made more permeable, there appears no reason why the same law should not hold good of ideational centres and their coupling-paths as well.[475] Parts of these centres which have once been in action together will thus grow so linked that excitement at one point will irradiate through the system. The chances of complete irradiation will be strong in proportion as the previous excitements have been frequent, and as the present points excited afresh are numerous. If all points were originally excited together, the irradiation may be sensibly simultaneous throughout the system, when any single point or group of points is touched off. But where the original impressions were successive--the conjugation of a Greek verb, for example--awakening nerve-tracts in a definite order, they will now, when one of them awakens, discharge into each other in that definite order and in no other way.
The reader will recollect all that has been said of increased tension in nerve-tracts and of the summation of stimuli (p. 82 ff.). We must therefore suppose that in these ideational tracts as well as elsewhere, activity may be awakened, in any particular locality, by the summation therein of a number of tensions, each incapable alone of provoking an actual discharge. Suppose for example the locality M to be in functional continuity with four other localities, K, L, N, and O.
Suppose moreover that on four previous occasions it has been separately combined with each of these localities in a common activity. M may then be indirectly awakened by any cause which tends to awaken either K, L, N, or O. But if the cause which awakens K, for instance, be so slight as only to increase its tension without arousing it to full discharge, K will only succeed in slightly increasing the tension of M. But if at the same time the tensions of L, N, and O are similarly increased, the combined effects of all four upon M may be so great as to awaken an actual discharge in this latter locality. In like manner if the paths between M and the four other localities have been so slightly excavated by previous experience as to require a very intense excitement in either of the localities before M can be awakened, a less strong excitement than this in any one will fail to reach M. But if all four at once are mildly excited, their compound effect on M may be adequate to its full arousal.
_The psychological law of association_ of objects thought of through their previous contiguity in thought or experience _would thus be an effect, within the mind, of the physical fact that nerve-currents propagate themselves easiest through those tracts of conduction which have been already most in use._ Descartes and Locke hit upon this explanation, which modern science has not yet succeeded in improving.
"Custom," says Locke, "settles habits of thinking in the understanding, as well as of determining in the will, and of motions in the body; all which seem to be but _trains of motion in the animal spirits_ [by this Locke meant identically what we understand by _neural processes_] which, once set agoing, continue in the same steps they have been used to, which by often treading are worn into a smooth path, and the motion in it becomes easy and, as it were, natural."[476] Hartley was more thorough in his grasp of the principle. The sensorial nerve-currents, produced when objects are fully present, were for him 'vibrations,' and those which produce ideas of objects in their absence were 'miniature vibrations.' And he sums up the cause of mental association in a single formula by saying: "Any vibrations, A, B, C, etc., by being associated together a sufficient Number of Times, get such a Power over _a, b, c,_ etc., the corresponding Miniature Vibrations, that any of the Vibrations A, when impressed alone, shall be able to excite _b, c,_ etc., the Miniatures of the rest."[477] It is evident that if there be any law of neural habit similar to this, the contiguities, coexistences, and successions, met with in outer experience, must inevitably be copied more or less perfectly in our thought. If A B C D E be a sequence of outer impressions (they may be events or they may be successively experienced properties of an object) which once gave rise to the successive 'ideas' _a b c d e_, then no sooner will A impress us again and awaken the _a_, than _b c d e_ will arise as ideas even before B C D E have come in as impressions. In other words, the order of impressions will the next time be _anticipated_; and the mental order will so far forth copy the order of the outer world. Any object when met again will make us expect its former concomitants, through the overflowing of its brain-tract into the paths which lead to theirs. And all these suggestions will be effects of a material law.
Where the associations are, as here, of successively appearing things, the distinction I made at the outset of the chapter, between a connection _thought of_ and a connection _of thoughts_, is unimportant.
For the connection thought of is concomitance or succession; and the connection between the thoughts is just the same. The 'objects' and the 'ideas' fit into parallel schemes, and may be described in identical language, as contiguous things tending to be thought again together, or contiguous ideas tending to recur together.
Now were these cases fair samples of all association, the distinction I drew might well be termed a _Spitzfindigkeit_ or piece of pedantic hair-splitting, and be dropped. But as a matter of fact we cannot treat the subject so simply. The same outer object may suggest _either of many_ realities formerly associated with it--for in the vicissitudes of our outer experience we are constantly liable to meet the same thing in the midst of differing companions--and a philosophy of association that should merely say that it will suggest one of these, or even of that one of them which it has oftenest accompanied, would go but a very short way into the _rationale_ of the subject. This, however, is about as far as most associationists have gone with their 'principle of contiguity.' Granted an object, A, they never tell us beforehand which of its associates it _will_ suggest; their wisdom is limited to showing, after it _has_ suggested a second object, that that object was once an associate. They have had to supplement their principle of Contiguity by other principles, such as those of Similarity and Contrast, before they could begin to do justice to the richness of the facts.
THE ELEMENTARY LAW OF ASSOCIATION.
I shall try to show, in the pages which immediately follow, that there is no other _elementary_ causal law of association than the law of neural habit. All the _materials_ of our thought are due to the way in which one elementary process of the cerebral hemispheres tends to excite whatever other elementary process it may have excited at some former time. The number of elementary processes at work, however, and the nature of those which at any time are fully effective in rousing the others, determine the character of the total brain-action, and, as a consequence of this, they determine the object thought of at the time. According as this resultant object is one thing or another, we call it a product of association by contiguity or of association by similarity, or contrast, or whatever other sorts we may have recognized as ultimate. Its production, however, is, in each one of these cases, to be explained by a merely quantitative variation in the elementary brain-processes momentarily at work under the law of habit, so that _psychic_ contiguity, similarity, etc., are derivatives of a single profounder kind of fact.
My thesis, stated thus briefly, will soon become more clear; and at the same time certain disturbing factors, which co-operate with the law of neural habit, will come to view.
Let us then assume as the _basis_ of all our subsequent reasoning this law: _When two elementary brain-processes have been active together or in immediate succession, one of them, on reoccurring, tends to propagate its excitement into the other._ But, as a matter of fact, every elementary process has found itself at different times excited in conjunction with _many_ other processes, and this by unavoidable outward causes. Which of these others it shall awaken now becomes a problem. Shall _b_ or _c_ be aroused next by the present _a_? We must make a further postulate, based, however, on the fact of _tension_ in nerve-tissue, and on the fact of summation of excitements, each incomplete or latent in itself, into an open resultant.[478] The process _b_, rather than _c_, will awake, if in addition to the vibrating tract _a_ some other tract _d_ is in a state of sub-excitement, and formerly was excited with _b_ alone and not with _a_. In short, we may say: _The amount of activity at any given point in the brain-cortex is the sum of the tendencies of all other points to discharge into it, such tendencies being proportionate_ (1) _to the number of times the excitement of each other point may have accompanied that of the point in question_; (2) _to the intensity of such excitements; and_ (3) _to the absence of any rival point functionally disconnected with the first point, into which the discharges might be diverted._ Expressing the fundamental law in this most complicated way leads to the greatest ultimate simplification. Let us, for the present, only treat of spontaneous trains of thought and ideation, such as occur in revery or musing. The case of voluntary thinking toward a certain end shall come up later.
Take, to fix our ideas, the two verses from 'Locksley Hall': "I, the heir of all _the ages_ in the foremost files of time," and-- "For I doubt not through _the ages_ one increasing purpose runs."
Why is it that when we recite from memory one of these lines, and get as far as _the ages_, that portion of the _other_ line which follows, and, so to speak, sprouts out of _the ages_, does not also sprout out of our memory, and confuse the sense of our words? Simply because the word that follows _the ages_ has its brain-process awakened not simply by the brain-process of _the ages_ alone, but by it _plus_ the brain-processes of all the words preceding _the ages_. The word _ages_ at its moment of strongest activity would, _per se_, indifferently discharge into either 'in' or 'one.' So would the previous words (whose tension is momentarily much less strong than that of _ages_) each of them indifferently discharge into either of a large number of other words with which they have been at different times combined. But when the processes of '_I, the heir of all the ages_,' simultaneously vibrate in the brain, the last one of them in a maximal, the others in a fading phase of excitement; then the strongest line of discharge will be that which they _all alike_ tend to take. '_In_' and not '_one_' or any other word will be the next to awaken, for its brain-process has previously vibrated in unison not only with that of _ages_, but with that of all those other words whose activity is dying away. It is a good case of the effectiveness over thought of what we called on p. 258 a 'fringe.'
But if some one of these preceding words--'heir,' for example--had an intensely strong association with some brain-tracts entirely disjoined in experience from the poem of 'Locksley Hall'--if the reciter, for instance, were tremulously awaiting the opening of a will which might make him a millionaire--it is probable that the path of discharge through the words of the poem would be suddenly interrupted at the word 'heir.' His _emotional interest in that word_ would be such that its _own special associations would prevail_ over the combined ones of the other words. He would, as we say, be abruptly reminded of his personal situation, and the poem would lapse altogether from his thoughts.
The writer of these pages has every year to learn the names of a large number of students who sit in alphabetical order in a lecture-room. He finally learns to call them by name, as they sit in their accustomed places. On meeting one in the street, however, early in the year, the face hardly ever recalls the name, but it may recall the place of its owner in the lecture-room, his neighbors' faces, and consequently his general alphabetical position; and then, usually as the common associate of all these combined data, the student's name surges up in his mind.
A father wishes to show to some guests the progress of his rather dull child in Kindergarten instruction. Holding the knife upright on the table, he says, "What do you call that, my boy?" "I calls it a _knife_, I does," is the sturdy reply, from which the child cannot be induced to swerve by any alteration in the form of question, until the father recollecting that in the Kindergarten a pencil was used, and not a knife, draws a long one from his pocket, holds it in the same way, and then gets the wished-for answer, "I calls it _vertical_." All the concomitants of the Kindergarten experience had to recombine their effect before the word 'vertical' could be reawakened.
Professor Bain, in his chapters on 'Compound Association,' has treated in a minute and exhaustive way of this type of mental sequence, and what he has done so well need not be here repeated.[479] The ideal working of the law of compound association, were it unmodified by any extraneous influence, would be such as to keep the mind in a perpetual treadmill of concrete reminiscences from which no detail could be omitted. Suppose, for example, we begin by thinking of a certain dinner-party. The only thing which all the components of the dinner-party could combine to recall would be the first concrete occurrence which ensued upon it. All the details of this occurrence could in turn only combine to awaken the next following occurrence, and so on. If _a, b, c, d, e,_ for instance, be the elementary nerve-tracts excited by the last act of the dinner-party, call this act A, and _l, m, n, o, p,_ be those of walking home through the frosty night, which we may call B, then the thought of A must awaken that of B, because _a, b, c, d, e,_ will each and all discharge into _l_ through the paths by which their original discharge took place. Similarly they will discharge into _m, n, o,_ and _p_; and these latter tracts will also each reinforce the other's action because, in the experience B, they have already vibrated in unison. The lines in Fig. 40 symbolize the summation of discharges into each of the components of B, and the consequent strength of the combination of influences by which B in its totality is awakened.
Hamilton first used the word 'redintegration' to designate all association. Such processes as we have just described might in an emphatic sense be termed redintegrations, for they would necessarily lead, if unobstructed, to the reinstatement in thought of the _entire_ content of large trains of past experience. From this complete redintegration there could be no escape save through the irruption of some new and strong present impression of the senses, or through the excessive tendency of some one of the elementary brain-tracts to discharge independently into an aberrant quarter of the brain. Such was the tendency of the word 'heir' in the verse from 'Locksley Hall,' which was our first example. How such tendencies are constituted we shall have soon to inquire with some care. Unless they are present, the panorama of the past, once opened, must unroll itself with fatal literality to the end, unless some outward sound, sight, or touch divert the current of thought.
Let us call this process _impartial redintegration_. Whether it ever occurs in an absolutely complete form is doubtful. We all immediately recognize, however, that in some minds there is a much greater tendency than in others for the flow of thought to take this form. Those insufferably garrulous old women, those dry and fanciless beings who spare you no detail, however petty, of the facts they are recounting, and upon the thread of whose narrative all the irrelevant items cluster as pertinaciously as the essential ones, the slaves of literal fact, the stumblers over the smallest abrupt step in thought, are figures known to all of us. Comic literature has made her profit out of them. Juliet's nurse is a classical example. George Eliot's village characters and some of Dickens's minor personages supply excellent instances.
Perhaps as successful a rendering as any of this mental type is the character of Miss Bates in Miss Austen's 'Emma.' Hear how she redintegrates: "'But where could _you_ hear it?' cried Miss Bates. 'Where could you possibly hear it, Mr. Knightley? For it is not five minutes since I received Mrs. Cole's note--no, it cannot be more than five--or at least ten--for I had got my bonnet and spencer on, just ready to come out--I was only gone down to speak to Patty again about the pork--Jane was standing in the passage--were not you, Jane?--for my mother was so afraid that we had not any salting-pan large enough. So I said I would go down and see, and Jane said: "Shall I go down instead?
for I think you have a little cold, and Patty has been washing the kitchen." "Oh, my dear," said I--well, and just then came the note.
A Miss Hawkins--that's all I know--a Miss Hawkins, of Bath. But, Mr.
Knightley, how could you possibly have heard it? for the very moment Mr. Cole told Mrs. Cole of it, she sat down and wrote to me. A Miss Hawkins--'" But in every one of us there are moments when this complete reproduction of all the items of a past experience occurs. What are those moments? They are moments of emotional recall of the past as something which once was, but is gone for ever--moments, the interest of which consists in the feeling that our self was once other than it now is. When this is the case, any detail, however minute, which will make the past picture more complete, will also have its effect in swelling that total contrast between _now_ and _then_ which forms the central interest of our contemplation.
ORDINARY OR MIXED ASSOCIATION.
This case helps us to understand why it is that the ordinary spontaneous flow of our ideas does not follow the law of impartial redintegration. _In no revival of a past experience are all the items of our thought equally operative in determining what the next thought shall be. Always some ingredient is prepotent over the rest._ Its special suggestions or associations in this case will often be different from those which it has in common with the whole group of