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SECTION IL. 1883. | [Er 910] TRANS. Roy. Soc. CANADA. 
The Nomenclature of the Laws of Association. 
By THE Rey. J. CraArk Murray, LL.D. 
(Read May 23, 1883.) 
The Laws of Association are often distinguished by psychologists into Primary and 
Secondary, and the distinction is one of importance and even necessity. The primary 
laws are those fundamental relations, which must exist between thoughts in order to 
render one capable of suggesting another. The secondary laws are merely certain 
subordinate influences, such as the intensity or recentness of thoughts, which modify the 
action of the primary laws. Accordingly, when the Laws of Association are spoken of 
without any qualifying prhase, it is always the primary laws that are understood. It is to 
these laws, therefore, that the present paper refers. 
Now, there are two fundamental relations by which the mutual suggestion of thoughts 
is determined ; and, consequently, the Primary Laws of Association are, in their highest 
generalization, reducible to two. These may be expressed as follows :— 
I. States of mind, identical in nature, though differing in the time of their occur- 
rence, are capable of suggesting each other ; 
II. States of mind, though differing in nature, if identical in the time of their occur- 
rence, are capable of suggesting each other. 
These two laws evidently comprehend all possible cases of suggestion, as they 
apply both to phenomena which are identical and to those which are different in nature. 
The first law requires, in order to the possibility of suggestion, that there be a natural 
resemblance between the suggesting and the suggested states of mind. Thus when I hear 
a sound which I recognize as the voice of a friend, the recognition implies that the sound 
of the present moment suggests to me the sound of the voice heard before. Now, the two 
sounds are similar in their nature ; they differ merely in the time of their occurrence, the 
one being heard now, the other haying been heard on some previous occasion. The two 
sounds, therefore, fulfil the conditions of the first law. But the act of which we are 
speaking—the recognition of a particular sound as being the voice of a friend—implies 
something more. Not only does the present recall the former sound, but it recalls also the 
friend’s appearance, with which that sound is associated. Now, there is no natural resem- 
blance between a man’s visual appearance and the sound of his voice, but the two have, 
by hypothesis, been in the mind at the same time. They, therefore, fulfil the conditions of 
the second law, and the one is thereby rendered capable of suggesting the other. 
Such is the general purport of these laws. The nomenclature, by which they are 
distinguished can scarcely be said to be universally determined among psychologists. The 
names, Law of Similarity and Law of Contiguity, are those adopted, perhaps most 
commonly, in English psychological literature. At the same time these terms can scarcely 
