572 P8YCH0L0OT. 



associations in this case will often be difterent from tliose 

 which it has in common with the whole group of items ; 

 and its tendency to awaken these outlying associates will 

 deflect the path of our revery. Just as in the original 

 sensible experience our attention focalized it self upon a 

 few of the impressions of the scene before us, so here in 

 the reproduction of those impressions an equal partiality 

 is shown, and some items are emphasized above the rest. 

 "What these items shall be is, in most cases of s2)ontaneous 

 revery, hard to determine beforehand. In subjective terms 

 we say that the prepotent items are those lohich appeal most 



to our INTEREST. 



Expressed in brain-terms, the law of interest will be : 

 some one brain-process is ahvays prepotent above its concomi- 

 tants in arousing action elsewhere. 



" Two processes," says Mr. Hodgson,* " are constantly going on in 

 redintegration. Tlae one a process of corrosion, melting, decay; the 

 other a process of renewing, arising, becoming. ... No object of repre- 

 sentation remains long before consciousness in the same state, but 

 fades, decays, and becomes indistinct. Those parts of the object, how- 

 ever, which possess an interest resist this tendency to gradual decay of 

 the whole object. . . . This inequality in the object — some parts, the un- 

 interesting, submitting to decay; others, the interesting parts, resisting 

 it — when it has continued for a certain time, ends in becoming a new 

 object." 



Only where the interest is diffused equally over all the 

 parts (as in the emotional memory just referred to, where, 

 as all past, they all interest us alike) is this law departed 

 from. It will be least obeyed by those minds which have 

 the smallest variety and intensity of interests — those who, 

 by the general flatness and jjoverty of their gesthetic nature, 

 are kept for ever rotating among the literal sequences of 

 their local and personal history. 



Most of us, however, are better organized than this, and 



* Time and Space, p. 266. Compare Coleridge : " The true practical 

 general iaw of association is this : that whatever makes certain parts of a 

 total impression more vivid or distinct than the rest will determine the mind 

 to recall these, in preference to others equally linked together by the com- 

 mon condition of contemporaeity or of contiguity But the will itself, by 

 confining and intensifying the attention, maj- arbitrarily give vividness or 

 distinctness to any object whatsoever." (Biographia Litteraria, Chap. V.) 



