674 P8YCH0L00T. 



seek to remember a name. It tingles, it trembles on the 

 verge, but does not come. Just such a tingling and trem- 

 bling of unrecovered associates is tlie penumbra of recog- 

 nition that may surround any experience and make it 

 seem familiar, though we know not why.* 



* Professor Hoffding considers thai the absence of contiguous associates 

 distinctly thouglit-of is a proof that associative processes are not concerned 

 in these cases of instantaneous recognition -where we get a strong sense of 

 familiarity with the object, but no recall of previous time or place. His 

 theory of what happens is that the object before us, A, comes with a sense of 

 familiarity whenever it awakens a slumbering image, a, of its own past self, 

 whilst without this image it seems unfamiliar. The quality of familiarity 

 is due to the coalescence of the two similar processes A -\- a in the brain 

 (Psychologic, p. 188; Vierteljsch. f. wiss. Phil., xiii. 432 [1889]). This 

 explanation is a very tempting one where the phenomenon of recognition is 

 reduced to its simplest terms. Experiments have been performed in Wundt's 

 laboratory (by Messrs. "Wolfe, see below, p. 679, and Lehmann (Philoso- 

 phische Studien, v. 96), in which a person had to tell out of several closely re- 

 sembling sensible impressions (sounds, tints of color) presented, which of 

 them was the same with one presented a moment before. And it does 

 seem here as if the fading process in the just-excited tract must combine 

 with the process of the new impression to give to the latter a peculiar sub- 

 jective tinge which should separate it from the impressions which the 

 other objects give. But recognition of this immediate sort is beyond our 

 power after a very short time has intervened. A couple of minutes' in- 

 terval is generally fatal to it ; so that it is impossible to conceive that 

 our frequent instantaneous recognition of a face, e.g., as having been 

 met before, takes place by any such simple process. Where we as- 

 sociate a head of classification with the object, the time-interval has 

 much less effect. Dr. Lehmann could identify shades of gray much 

 more successfully and permanently after mentally attaching names or 

 numbers to them. Here it is the recall of the contiguous a.ssociate, 

 the number or name, which brings about the recognition. Where an 

 experience is complex, each element of the total object has had the otJier 

 elements for its past contiguous associates. Each element thus tends to 

 revive the other elements from within, at the same time that the outward 

 object is making them revive from without. We have thus, whenever we 

 meet a familiar object, that sense of expectation gratified which is so large 

 a factor in our aesthetic emotions ; and even were there no 'fringe of ten- 

 dency ' toward the arousal of extrinsic associates (which there certainly al- 

 ways is), still this intrinsic play of mutual association among the parts 

 would give a character of ease to familiar percepts which would make of 

 them a distinct subjective class. A process tills its old bed in a different 

 way from that in which it makes a new bed. One can appeal to introspec- 

 tion for proof. When, for example, I go into a slaughter-house into which 

 I once went years ago, and the horrid din of the screaming hogs strikes 

 me with the overpowering sense of identification, when the blood-stained 

 face of the ' sticker,' whom I had long cea.sed to think of, is immediately 



