THE ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS. 589 



A fourth factor in tracing the course of reproduction is congicuity 

 in emotional tone between the reproduced idea and our mood. The 

 same objects do not recall the same associates when we are cheerful as 

 when we are melancholy. Nothing, in fact, is more striking than our 

 utter inability to keep up trains of joyous imagery when we are de- 

 pressed in spirits. Storm, darkness, war, images of disease, poverty, 

 and perishing afflict unremittingly the imaginations of melancholiacs. 

 And those of sanguine temperament, when their spirits are high, find 

 it equally impossible to give any permanence to evil forebodings or to 

 gloomy thoughts in general. In an instant the train of association 

 dances off to flowers and sunshine, and images of spring and hope. 

 The records of Arctic or African travel perused in one mood awaken 

 no thoughts but those of horror at the malignity of Nature ; read at 

 another time they suggest only enthusiastic reflections on the indom- 

 mitable power and pluck of man. Few novels so overflow with joy- 

 ous animal spirits as " The Three Guardsmen " of Dumas. Yet it may 

 awaken in the mind of a reader depressed with sea-sickness (as the 

 writer can personally testify) a most dismal and woful consciousness 

 of the cruelty and carnage which heroes like Athos, Porthos, and 

 Aramis make themselves guilty of. 



Habit, recency, vividness, and emotional congruity are, then, all rea- 

 sons why one representation rather than another should be awakened 

 by the interesting portion of a departing thought. We may say with 

 truth that in the majority of cases the coming representation will have 

 been either habitual, recent, or vivid, and will be congruous. If all 

 these qualities unite in any one absent associate, we may predict almost 

 infallibly that that associate of the going thought will form an im- 

 portant ingredient in the coming thought. In spite of the fact, however, 

 that the succession of representations is thus redeemed from perfect 

 indeterminism and limited to a few classes whose characteristic quality 

 is fixed by the nature of our past experience, it must still be confessed 

 that an immense number of terms in the linked chain of our represen- 

 tations fall outside of all assignable rule. To take the instance of 

 the clock given on page 586. Why did the jeweler's shop suggest the 

 shirt-studs rather than a chain which I had bought there more recently, 

 which has cost more, and whose sentimental associations were much 

 more interesting? Both chain and studs had excited brain-tracts 

 simultaneously with the excitement of others by the general aspect of 

 the shop. The only reason why the nerve-stream from the shop-tract 

 switched off into the stud-tract rather than the chain-tract must be 

 that the stud-tract happened at that moment to He more open, either 

 because of some accidental alteration in its nutrition or because the 

 incipient sub-conscious tensions of the brain as a whole had so dis- 

 tributed their equilibrium that it was more unstable here than in the 

 chain-tract. Any reader's introspection will easily furnish similar in- 

 stances. It thus remains true that to a certain extent, even in those 



