586 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



neous reverie, hard to determine beforehand. In subjective terms we 

 say that the prepotent items are those which appeal most to om- interest. 



Expressed in brain-terms, the law of interest will be : some one 

 bram-process is ahoays prepotent above its concomitants in arousing 

 action elsewhere. 



" Two processes," says Mr. Hodgson,* " are constantly going on in 

 redintegration. The one a process of corrosion, melting, decay ; the 

 other a process of renewing, arising, becoming. . . . No object of rep- 

 resentation remains long before consciousness in the same state, but 

 fades, decays, and becomes indistinct. Those parts of the object, how- 

 ever, which possess an interest, that is, those which are attended by a 

 representation of pleasure or pain, resist this tendency to gradual decay 

 of the whole object. . . . This inequality in the object — some parts, 

 the uninteresting, submitting to decay ; others, the interesting parts, 

 resisting it — when it has continued for a certain time, ends in becom- 

 ing a new object." Only where the interest is diffused equally over 

 all the parts (as in the emotional memory just referred to, where, as 

 all past^ they all interest us alike) is this law departed from. It will 

 be least obeyed by those minds which have the smallest variety and 

 intensity of interests — those who, by the general flatness and poverty 

 of their aesthetic nature, are kept for ever rotating among the literal 

 sequences of their local and personal history. 



Most of us, however, are better organized than this, and our musings 

 pursue an erratic course, swerving continually into a new direction 

 traced out by the shifting play of interest as it irradiates always some 

 partial item in each comj^lex representation that is evoked. Thus it 

 commonly comes about that we find ourselves thinking at two nearly 

 adjacent moments of things separated by the whole diameter of space 

 and time. Not till we carefully recall each step of our cogitation do 

 we see how naturally we came by Hodgson's law to pass from one to 

 the other. Thus, for instance, after looking at my clock just now, I 

 found myself thinking of Senator Bayard's recent resolution about 

 our legal-tender notes. The clock called up the image of the man 

 who had repaired its gong. He suggested the jeweler's shop where I 

 had last seen him ; that shop, some shirt-studs which I had bought 

 there ; they, the value of gold and its recent decline ; the latter, the 

 equal value of greenbacks, and this naturally the question of how 

 long they were to last, and of the Bayard proposition. Each of these 

 images offered various points of interest. Those which formed the 

 turning-points of my thought are easily assigned. The gong was 

 momentarily the most interesting part of the clock, because, from hav- 

 ing begun with a beautiful tone, it had become discordant and aroused 

 disappointment and perplexity. But for this, the clock might have 

 suggested the friend who gave it to me, or any one of a thousand cir- 

 cumstances connected with it. The jeweler's shop suggested the studs, 

 * " Time and Space," p. 266. ' 



