DISCHIMINATION AND C0MPARI80N. 507 



it simultaneously gave us will indistinguishably coexist. Let a white 

 ball succeed to it ; now, and not before, will an attribute detach itself, 

 and the coloi\ by force of contrast, be shaken out into the foreground. 

 Let the white ball be replaced by an egg, and this new difference will 

 bring the form into notice from its previous slumber, and thus that 

 which began by being simply an object cut out from the surrounding 

 scene becomes for us first a red object, then a red round object, and 

 so on." 



Why the repetition of the character in combination with 

 different wholes will cause it thus to break up its adhesion 

 with any one of them, and roll out, as it were, alone upon 

 the table of consciousness, is a little of a mystery. One 

 might suppose the nerve-processes of the various concom- 

 itants to neutralize or inhibit each other more or less and 

 to leave the process of the common term alone distinctly 

 active. Mr. Spencer ajDpears to think that the mere fact 

 that the common term is repeated more often than any one 

 of its associates will, of itself, give it such a degree of in- 

 tensity that its abstraction must needs ensue. 



This has a plausible sound, but breaks down when ex- 

 amined closely. For it is not always the often-repeated 

 character which is first noticed when its concomitants have 

 varied a certain number of times ; it is even more likely to 

 be the most novel of all the concomitants, which will arrest 

 the attention. If a boy has seen nothing all his life but 

 sloops and schooners, he will probably never distinctly 

 have singled out in his notion of ' sail ' the character of be- 

 ing hung lengthwise. When for the first time he sees a 

 square-rigged ship, the opportunity of extracting the length- 

 wise mode of hanging as a special accident, and of disso- 

 ciating it from the general notion of sail, is offered. But 

 there are twenty chances to one that that will not be the 

 form of the boy's consciousness. What he notices will be 

 the new and exceptional character of being hung crosswise. 

 He will go home and speak of that, and perhaps never con- 

 sciously formulate what the more familiar peculiarity con- 

 sists in. 



This mode of abstraction is realized on a very wide 

 scale, because the elements of the world in which we find 

 ourselves appear, as a matter of fact, here, there, and every- 

 where, and are changing their concomitants all the while. 



