694 PSYCEOLOQT. 



giving us a perfect mechanical diagram of the capricious 

 play of similar association in the most gifted mind. The 

 study of dreams confirms this view. The usual abundance 

 of paths of irradiation seems, in the dormant brain, reduced. 

 A few only are pervious, and the most fantastic sequences 

 occur because the currents run — ' like sparks in burnt- up 

 paper ' — wherever the nutrition of the moment creates an 

 opening, but nowhere else. 



The eff'eds of interested attention and volition remain. 

 These activities seem to hold fast to certain elements, and 

 by emphasizing them and dwelling on them, to make their 

 associates the only ones which are evoked. This is the 

 point at which an anti-mechanical psychology must, if any- 

 where, make it stand in dealing with association. Every- 

 thing else is pretty certainly due to cerebral laws. My 

 own oj)inion on the question of active attention and spirit- 

 ual spontaneity is expressed elsewhere. But even though 

 there be a mental spontaneity, it can certainly not create 

 ideas or summon them ex ahrupto. Its power is limited to 

 selecting amongst those which the associative machinery 

 has already introduced or tends to introduce. If it can 

 emphasize, reinforce, or protract for a second either one of 

 these, it can do all that the most eager advocate of free will 

 need demand ; for it then decides the direction of the next 

 associations by making them hinge upon the emphasized 

 term ; and determining in this wise the course of the man's 

 thinking, it also determines his acts. 



THE HISTORY OF OPINION CONCERNING AeSOCIATION 



may be briefly glanced at ere we end the chapter.* Aris- 

 totle seems to have caught both the facts and the principle 

 of explanation ; but he did not expand his views, and it was 

 not till the time of Hobbes that the matter was again touched 

 on in a definite way. Hobbes first formulated the problem 

 of the succession of our thoughts. He writes in Leviathan, 

 chapter m, as follows : 



* See, for farther details, Hamilton's Reid, Appendices D** and D***; 

 and L. Ferri, La Psychologie de lAssociation (Paris, 1883). Also Robert- 

 son, art. Association in Encyclop. Britannica. 



