COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



many recurrences of a certain relation we come 

 to have a strong belief in that relation ; that if 

 a relation has been daily experienced through- 

 out life with scarcely an exception, it becomes 

 difficult for us to conceive it as otherwise — to 

 break the connection between the states of con- 

 sciousness representing it ; and that where a 

 relation has been perpetually repeated in our 

 experience with absolute uniformity, we are en- 

 tirely disabled from conceiving the negation of 



The correspondence between the subjective 

 and the objective sides of the phenomena is 

 thus complete, and the increasing complication 

 of cell and fibre in the brain, from infancy to 

 old age, is seen to have a psychological mean- 

 ing. If the acquisition of a new idea is attended 

 by the passage of a wave of molecular motion 

 along a new path, and if recollection is a state 

 of consciousness attending the transmission of 

 a later wave along the same path, we have an 

 adequate physical interpretation of the fact that 

 the repetition of an idea is favourable to the re- 

 collection of it. And we have also the physical 

 interpretation of habit and prejudice. Molecu- 

 lar motions that have been repeatedly trans- 

 mitted between particular groups of nerve cells 

 end by establishing more or less intricate webs 



1 Spencer, Principles of Psychology , vol. i. p. 421. [Part 

 II. chapter iii. § 189.] 



216 



