NECESSARY TRUTHS— EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 633 



But uow the plot thickens, for the images impressed 

 upou our memory by the outer stimuli are uot restricted to 

 the mere time- aud space-relations, in which thej originally 

 came, but revive in various manners (dependent on the in- 

 tricacy of the brain-paths and the instability of the tissue 

 thereof), and form secondary combinations such as the 

 forms of judgment, which, taken per se, are not congruent 

 either with the forms in which reality exists or in those in 

 which experiences befall us, but which may nevertheless 

 be explained by the way in which experiences befall in a 

 mind gifted with memory, expectation, and the possibility 

 of feeling doubt, curiosity, belief, and denial. The con- 

 junctions of experience befall more or less invariably, vari- 

 ably, or never. The idea of one term will then engender a 

 fixed, a wavering, or a negative expectation of another, giv- 

 ing affirmative, the hypothetical, disjunctive, interrogative, 

 and negative judgments, and judgments of actuality and 

 possibility about certain things. The separation of attribute 

 from subject in all judgments (which violates the way in 

 which nature exists) may be similarl}^ explained by the 

 piecemeal order in which our perceptions come to us, a 

 vague nucleus growing gradually more detailed as we attend 

 to it more and more. These particular secondary mental 

 forms have had amj)le justice done them by associationists 

 from Hume downwards. 



Associationists have also sought to account for discrim- 

 ination, abstraction, and generalization by the rates of fre- 

 quency in which attributes come to us conjoined. With 

 much less success, I think. In the chapter on Discrimina- 

 tion, I have, under the "law of dissociation by varying con- 

 comitants," sought to explain as much as possible by the 

 passive order of experience. But the reader saw how much 

 was left for active interest and unknown forces to do. In 

 the chapter on Imagination I have similarly striven to do 

 justice to the * blended image ' theory of generalization and 

 abstraction. So I need say no more of these matters here. 



THE GENESIS OF THE NATURAL SCIENCES. 



Our ' scientific ' ways of thinking the outer reality are 

 highly abstract ways. The essence of things for science is 



