THE ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 587 



because they alone of all its contents were tinged with the egoistic in- 

 terest of possession. This interest in the studs, their value, made me 

 single out the material as its chief source, etc., to the end. Every 

 reader who will arrest himself at any moment and say, " How came I 

 to be thinking of just this ? " will be sure to trace a train of repre- 

 sentations linked together by lines of contiguity and points of interest 

 inextricably combined. This is the ordinary process of the association 

 of ideas as it spontaneously goes on in average minds. We may call 

 it Partial or Mixed Association. 



Another example of it is given by Hobbes in a passage which has 

 been'quoted so often as to be classical : " In a discourse of our present 

 civil war, what could seem more impertinent than to ask (as one did) 

 what was the value of a Roman j^enny ? Yet the coherence to me was 

 manifest enough. For the thought of the war introduced the thought 

 of the delivering up the King to his enemies ; the thought of that 

 brought in the thought of the delivering up of Christ ; and that again 

 the thought of the thirty pence, which was the price of that treason : 

 and thence easily followed that malicious question ; and all this in a 

 moment of time ; for thought is quick." 



Can we determine now when a certain portion of the going thought 

 has, by dint of its interest, become so prepotent as to make its own 

 exclusive associates the dominant features of the coming thought — can 

 we, I say, detei-mine which of its own associates shall be evoked ? For 

 they are many. As Hodgson says : " The interesting parts of the 

 decaying object are free to combine again with any objects or parts of 

 objects with which at any time they have been combined before. All 

 the former combinations of these parts may come back into conscious- 

 ness ; one must ; but which will ? " Mr. Hodgson replies : " There 

 can be but one answer : that which has been most habitually combined 

 with them before. This new object begins at once to form itself in 

 consciousness, and to group its parts round the part still remaining 

 from the former object ; part after part comes out and arranges itself 

 in its old position; but scarcely has the process begun, when the origi- 

 nal law of interest begins to operate on this new formation, seizes on 

 the interesting parts and impresses them on the attention to the exclu- 

 sion of the rest, and the whole process is repeated again with endless 

 variety. I venture to propose this as a complete and true account of 

 the whole process of redintegration," 



In restricting the discharge from the interesting item into that 

 channel which is simply most habitual in the sense of most frequent, 

 Hodgson's account is assuredly imperfect. An image by no means 

 always revives its most frequent associate, although frequency is cer- 

 tainly one of the most potent determinants of revival. If I abruptly 

 utter the word swalloxo, the reader, if by habit an ornithologist, will 

 think of a bird ; if a physiologist or a medical specialist in throat-dis- 

 eases, he will think of deglutition. If I say date, he will, if a fruit- 



