^0() PSYCHOLOGY. 



analyze out of the wiue-taste. But uo oue knows what 

 * dryness ' tastes like, all by itself. It must, however, be 

 something extreme in the dry direction ; and we should 

 probably not fail to recognize it as the original of our ab- 

 stract conception, in case we ever did come across it. In 

 some such way we get to form notions of the flavor of meats, 

 apart from their feeling to the tongue, or of that of fruits 

 apart from their acidity, etc., and we abstract the touch of 

 bodies as distinct from their temperature. We may even 

 apprehend the quality of a muscle's contraction as distin- 

 guished from its extent, or one muscle's contraction from 

 another's, as when, by practising with prismatic glasses, 

 and varying our eyes' convergence whilst our accommoda- 

 tion remains the same, we learn the direction in which our 

 feeling of the convergence differs from that of the accom- 

 modation. 



But the fluctuation in a quality's intensity is a less effi- 

 cient aid to our abstracting of it than the diversity of the 

 other qualities in whose comjDany it may ap23ear. What is 

 associated noio luith oris thing and now ivith another tends to 

 become dissociated from either, and to groio into an object of ab- 

 stract contemplation by the mind. One might call this the 

 laio of dissociation by varying concomitants. The practical 

 result of it will be to allow the mind which has thus disso- 

 ciated and abstracted a character to analyze it out of a 

 total, whenever it meets with it again. The law has been 

 frequently recognized by psychologists, though I know of 

 none who has given it the emphatic prominence in our men- 

 tal history which it deserves. Mr. Spencer says : 



" If the property A occurs here along with the properties B, C, D, 

 there along with C, F, H. and again with E, G, B, . . . it must 

 happen that by multiplication of experiences the impressions produced 

 by these properties on the organism will be disconnected and rendered 

 so far independent in the organism as the properties are in the environ- 

 ment, whence must eventually result a power to recognize attributes in 

 themselves, apart from particular bodies."* 



And still more to the point Dr. Martineau, in the passage 

 1 have already quoted, writes : 



"When a red ivory ball, seen for the first time, has been with- 

 drawn, it will leave a mental representation of itself, in which all that 



* Psychology, i. 345. 



