ASSOCIATION. 651 



of the other, whereby their peculiar succession or coexist- 

 ence may be explained. 



But immediately an ambiguity arises : which sort of 

 connection is meant? connection thought-of, or connection 

 betiveen thoiights ? These are two entirely different things, 

 and only in the case of one of them is there any hope of 

 finding ' principles.' The jungle of connections thought of 

 can never be formulated simply. Every conceivable con- 

 nection may be thought of — of coexistence, succession, re- 

 semblance, contrast, contradiction, cause and effect, means 

 and end, genus and species, part and whole, substance 

 and property, early and late, large and small, landlord 

 and tenant, master and servant, — Heaven knows what, for 

 the list is literally inexhaustible. The only simjjlification 

 which could possibly be aimed at would be the reduction 

 of the relations to a smaller number of types, like those 

 which such authors as Kant and Renouvier call the ' cate- 

 gories ' of the understanding.* According as we followed 

 one category or another we should sweep, with our thought, 

 through the world in this way or in that. And all the cate- 

 gories would be logical, would be relations of reason. They 

 would fuse the items into a continuum. Were this the sort 

 of connection sought between one moment of our thinking 

 and another, our chapter might end here. For the only 

 summary description of these infinite possibilities of transi- 

 tion, is that they are all acts of reason, and that the mind 

 proceeds from one object to another by some rational path 

 of connection. The trueness of this formula is only equalled 

 by its sterility, for psychological purposes. Practically it 

 amounts to simply referring the inquirer to the relations 

 between facts or things, and to telling him that his thinking 

 follows them. 



But as a matter of fact, his thinking only sometimes 

 follows them, and these so-called ' transitions of reason ' 

 are far from being all alike reasonable. If pure thought 

 runs all our trains, why should she run some so fast and 

 some so slow, some through dull flats and some through 



* Compare Reuouvier's criticism of associationism in his Essais de 

 Critique generale, Logique, ii. p. 493 foil. 



