A8S0 CIA TION. 573 



our musings pursue an erratic course, swerving continu- 

 ally into some new direction traced by the shifting play 

 of interest as it ever falls on some partial item in each 

 complex representation that is evoked. Thus it so often 

 comes about that we find ourselves thinking at two nearly 

 adjacent moments of things separated by the whole diam- 

 eter of space and time. Not till we carefully recall each 

 step of our cogitation do we see how naturally we came by 

 Hodgson's law to pass from one to the other. Thus, for 

 instance, after looking at my clock just now (1879), I found 

 myself thinking of a recent resolution in the Senate about 

 our legal-tender notes. The clock called up the image of 

 the man who had repaired its gong. He suggested the 

 jeweller's shop where I had last seen him ; that shop, some 

 shirt-studs which I had bought there ; they, the value of 

 gold and its recent decline ; the latter, the equal value of 

 greenbacks, and this, naturally, the question of how long 

 they were to last, and of the Bayard proposition. Each of 

 these images offered various points of interest. Those 

 which formed the turning-points of my thought are easily 

 assigned. The gong was momentarily the most interesting 

 part of the clock, because, from ha\dng begun with a beau- 

 tiful tone, it had become discordant and aroused disap- 

 pointment. But for this the clock might have suggested 

 the friend who gave it to me, or an}- one of a thousand cir- 

 cumstances connected witli clocks. The jeweller's shop 

 suggested the studs, because they alone of all its contents' 

 were tinged with the egoistic interest of possession. This 

 interest in the studs, their value, made me single out the 

 material as its chief source, etc., to the end. Every reader 

 who will arrest himself at any moment and say, " How 

 came I to be thinking of just this ?" will be sure to trace a 

 train of representations linked together by lines of conti- 

 guity and points of interest inextricably combined. This 

 is the ordinary- process of the association of ideas as it 

 spontaneously goes on in average minds. We may coM it 



OKDINAEY, 07' MIXED, ASSOCIATION. 



Another example of it is given by Hobbes in a passage 

 which has been quoted so often as to be classical : 



