THE ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 579 



lessly as if it had never been called for — suggested, possibly, by the 

 flowers on the bonnet of the lady in front of us, or possibly by nothing 

 that we can discover? If Reason can give us relief then, why. did 

 she not do so earlier ? 



The truth must be admitted that pure Thought works under condi- 

 tions imposed ah extra. The great law of habit itself — that twenty 

 experiences make us recall a thing better than one, that long indul- 

 gence in error makes right thinking almost impossible — seems to have 

 no essential foundation in reason. The business of pure Thought is 

 with Truth — the number of experiences ought to have nothing to do 

 with her hold of it ; and she ought by right to be able to hug it all 

 the closer, after years wasted out of its presence. Such arrangements 

 seem quite fantastic and arbitrary, but nevertheless are part of the 

 very bone and marrow of our minds. Reason is only one out of a 

 thousand possibilities in the thinking of each of us. Who can count 

 all the silly fancies, the grotesque suppositions, the utterly irrelevant 

 reflections he makes in the course of a day ? Who can swear that his 

 prejudices and irrational beliefs constitute a less bulky part of his 

 mental furniture than his clarified opinions ? It is true that a presid- 

 ing arbiter seems to sit aloft in the mind, and emphasize the better 

 suggestions into permanence, while it ends by dropping out and leav- 

 ing unrecorded the confusion. But this is all the difference. The 

 mode of genesis of the worthy and the worthless seems the same. The 

 laws of our actual thinking, of the cogitatum, must account alike for 

 the bad and the good materials on which the arbiter has to decide, for 

 wisdom and for folly. The laws of the arbiter, of the cogitandum, of 

 what we ought to think, are to the former as the laws of ethics are to 

 those of history. Who but an Hegelian historian ever pretended that 

 reason in action was per se a sufiicient explanation of the political 

 changes in Europe ? 



There are, then, mechanical conditions on which Thought depends, 

 and which, to say the least, determine the order in which is presented 

 the content or material for her comparisons, selections, and decisions. 

 It is a suggestive fact that Locke, and many more recent Continental 

 psychologists, have found themselves obliged to invoke a mechanical 

 process to account for the aberrations of Thought, the obstructive pre- 

 possessions, the frustrations of Reason. This they found in the law of 

 habit, or what we now call Association by Contiguity. But it never 

 occurred to these writers that a process which could go the length of 

 actually producing some ideas and sequences in the mind might safely 

 be trusted to produce others too ; and that those habitual associa- 

 tions which further thought may come from the same mechanical 

 source as those which hinder it. Hartley accordingly suggested habit 

 as an all-sufficient explanation, but failed to dispose of the difficulty 

 which comes in when we notice that in the highest flights of Reason 

 habit does not seem the link between one item and the next. Rather 



