ASSOCIATION. 677 



reader depressed "witli sea-sickness (as the writer can per- 

 sonally testify) a most dismal and woful consciousness of 

 the cruelty and carnage of which heroes like Athos, Por- 

 thos, and Aramis make themselves guilty. 



Habit, recency, vividness, and emotional congruity are, then, 

 all reasons why one representation rather than another 

 should be awakened by the interesting portion of a dejDart- 

 ^'aig thought. We may say with truth that in the majority 

 of cases the coming representation loill have been either 

 habitual, recent, or vivid, and will be congruous. If all 

 these qualities unite in any one absent associate, we may 

 predict almost infallibly that that associate of the going 

 thought will form an important ingredient in the coming 

 thought. In sj)ite of the fact, however, that the succession 

 of representations is thus redeemed from perfect indeter- 

 minism and limited to a few classes whose characteristic 

 quality is fixed by the nature of our past experience, it 

 must still be confessed that an immense number of terms 

 in the linked chain of our representations fall outside of all 

 assignable rule. To take the instance of the clock given 

 on page 586. Why did the jeweller's shop suggest the shirt- 

 studs rather than a chain which I had bought there more 

 recently, which had cost more, and whose sentimental as- 

 sociations were much more interesting? Both chain and 

 studs had excited brain-tracts simultaneously with the shop. 

 The only reason why the nerve-stream from the shop-tract 

 switched off into the stud-tract rather than into the chain- 

 tract must be that the stud-tract hajjpened at that moment to 

 lie more open, either because of some accidental alteration in 

 its nutrition or because the incipient sub-conscious tensions 

 of the brain as a whole had so distributed their equilibrium 

 that it was more unstable here than in the chain-tract. 

 Any reader's introspection Avill easily furnish similar in- 

 stances. It thus remains true that to a certain extent, even 

 in those forms of ordinary mixed association which lie 

 nearest to impartial redintegration, ivhich associate of the 

 interesting item shall emerge must be called largely a mat- 

 ter of accident — accident, that is, for our intelligence. No 

 doubt it is determined by cerebral causes, but they are too 

 subtile and shifting for our analysis. 



