664 PSYCHOLOGY. 



association ' are considered to account for. In Chapters VI 

 and IX we saw abundant reasons for treating the doctrine 

 of simple ideas or psychic atoms as mythological ; and, in 

 all that follows, our problem will be to keep whatever truths 

 the associationist doctrine has caught sight of without 

 weighing it down with the untenable incumbrance that the 

 association is between 'ideas.' 



Association, so far as the word stands for an effect, is 

 betiveen things thought of — it is things, not ideas, ivhich are 

 associated in the mind. We ought to talk of the association 

 of objects, not of the association of ideas. And so far as 

 association stands for a cause, it is between processes in the 

 hrain — it is these which, by being associated in certain 

 ways, determine what successive objects shall be thought. 

 Let us proceed towards our final generalizations by survey- 

 ing first a few familiar facts. 



The laws of motor habit in the lower centres of the ner- 

 vous system are disputed by no one. A series of move- 

 ments repeated in a certain order tend to unroll themselves 

 w^ith peculiar ease in that order for ever afterward. Num- 

 ber one awakens number two, and that awakens number 

 three, and so on, till the last is produced. A habit of this 

 kind once become inveterate may go on automatically. And 

 so it is with the objects with which our thinking is con- 

 cerned. With some persons each note of a melody, heard 

 but once, will accurately revive in its jDroper sequence. 

 Small boys at school learn the inflections of many a Greek 

 noun, adjective, or verb, from the reiterated recitations 

 of the upper classes falling on their ear as they sit at their 

 desks. All this haj)pens with no voluntary efibrt on their 

 part and with no thought of the spelling of the words. The 

 doggerel rhymes which children use in their games, such as 

 the formula 



" Ana mana inona mike 

 Barcelona bona strike," 



used for 'counting out,' form another familiar example of 

 things heard in sequence cohering in the same order in the 

 memory. 



