vin PRACTICAL JUDGMENT 167 



g. Objects as centres of relations. 



Secondly, since the relations in which objects stand are 

 manifold, concrete experience supplies the possibility of 

 reacting to an object in very different ways, according to 

 the purpose in hand. Hence the comparative elasticity of 

 the Practical Judgment in the choice of means, which we 

 have contrasted with the rigidity of habit. 



Now Association is mental habit. If one learns a string 

 of words without meaning, like the Ena, mena, mona, mite 

 of childhood, each word calls up the other, not through 

 any appropriateness of relation, but through the influence 

 of past sequences. In consequence association, like all other 

 generic bases of reaction, will often act inappropriately. If 

 a man has got into the habit of winding up his watch 

 mechanically when he takes off his waistcoat, he will occa- 

 sionally find himself doing it if he happens to change his 

 clothes at any unusual time in the day. Similarly, if a 

 verse is being repeated by rote, a casual association may 

 lead to the substitution of a word or line belonging to 

 another verse, and making nonsense. These aberrations 

 are, of course, checked in human experience by the fact 

 that nonsense or abnormality at once arrests attention and 

 brings in higher processes than those of association. 



Association, then, tends to form a series in which a calls 

 up b, b calls up c, and so forth. 1 The idea which will 

 follow on a or b is determinate, and the more so the 

 stronger the association. If there is a well-rooted associa- 

 tion between a and b y b is the only possible follower of a. 

 The term a may stand in relation to very many other 

 terms, but by association it will preferably excite the idea 

 of one of them that one with which it is most intimately 

 associated. If more than one association has been formed, 

 the weaker must either give way or serve merely to 

 distract and weaken attention unless consciousness is com- 

 prehensive enough to hold both ideas before it in their 

 distinctness. Here, then, association is at a disadvantage 



1 It is true that earlier antecedents have their effect. In repeating a 

 verse by rote, it would hardly be accurate to think, for example, of each 

 word as the sole cause determining the reproduction of the word following 

 it. The general remembrance of the verse produces a mental atmosphere 

 which is, no doubt, an underlying condition of correct reproduction. 



