THE SCOPE OF PSYGROLOGF. 3 



of an hour ago ? Wh}-, again, in old age should its grasp 

 of childhood's events seem firmest ? Why should illness 

 and exhaustion enfeeble it ? Why should repeating an ex- 

 perience strengthen our recollection of it ? Why should 

 drugs, fevers, asphyxia, and excitement resuscitate things 

 long since forgotten ? If we content ourselves with merely 

 affirming that the faculty of memory is so peculiarl}' con- 

 stituted by nature as to exhibit just these oddities, we seem 

 little the better for having invoked it, for our explanation 

 becomes as complicated as that of the crude facts with which 

 we started. Moreover there is something grotesque and 

 irrational in the supposition that the soul is equipped with 

 elementar}^ powers of such an ingeniously intricate sort. 

 Why should our memory cling more easily to the near than 

 the remote ? Why should it lose its grasp of proper sooner 

 than of abstract names ? Such peculiarities seem quite fan- 

 tastic ; and might, for aught we can see a priori, be the 

 precise opposites of what they are. Evidently, then, the 

 faculty does not exist absolutely, but works under comlitions , 

 and the quest of the conditions becomes the psychologist's 

 most interesting task. 



However firmly he may hold to the soul and her re- 

 membering faculty, he must acknowledge that she never 

 exerts the latter without a cue, and that something must al- 

 ways precede and remind us of whatever we are to recollect. 

 " An idea .'" says the associationist, " an idea associated with 

 the remembered thing ; and this explains also why things 

 repeatedly met with are more easily recollected, for their as- 

 sociates on the various occasions furnish so many distinct 

 avenues of recall." But this does not explain the effects of 

 fever, exhaustion, hypnotism, old age, and the like. And 

 in general, the pure associationist's account of our mental 

 life is almost as bewildering as that of the pure spiritualist. 

 This multitude of ideas, existing absolutely, yet clinging 

 together, and weaving an endless carpet of themselves, like 

 dominoes in ceaseless change, or the bits of glass in a 

 kaleidoscope, — whence do they get their fantastic laws of 

 clinging, and why do they cling in just the shapes they do ? 



For this the associationist must introduce the order of 

 experience in the outer world. The dance of the ideas is 



