William James

“ But now let us suppose that that selective agency of interested attention, which may convert in the way we have seen complete contiguous association into partial association—let us suppose that it refines itself still further and accentuates a portion of the passing thought, so small as to be no longer the image of a concrete thing, but only of an abstract quality or property. Let us, moreover, suppose that the part thus accentuated persists in consciousness (or, in cerebral terms, has its brain-process excited) after the other portions of the thought have faded. ”

“ 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 departing thought. We may say with truth that in the majority of cases the coming representation will 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. ”

“ And those of sanguine temperament, when their spirits are high, find it equally impossible to give any permanence to evil forebodings or to gloomy thoughts in general. In an instant the train of association dances off to flowers and sunshine, and images of spring and hope. The records of Arctic or African travel perused in one mood awaken no thoughts but those of horror at the malignity of Nature; read at another time they suggest only enthusiastic reflections on the indommitable power and pluck of man. ”

“ If pure Thought runs all our trains, why should she run some so fast and some so slow, some through dull flats and some through gorgeous scenery, some to mountain-heights and jeweled mines, others through dismal swamps and darkness?—and run some off the track altogether, and into the wilderness of lunacy? Why do we spend years straining after a certain scientific or practical problem, but all in vain—Thought refusing to evoke the solution we desire? ”

“ No sensible man now considers the habit-philosophy of Hartley, Priestley, and James Mill to be adequate to its task. Professor Bain, reverting to Hume’s standpoint, supplements the law of Contiguity by that of Similarity, and, in a subordinate degree, by that of Contrast. All the materials of thought, without conception, are in his psychology pushed or drawn before the footlights of consciousness by the working of these laws and by them alone. ”

“ The jeweler’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 contiguity and points of interest inextricably combined. This is the ordinary process of the association of ideas as it spontaneously goes on in average minds. ”

“ It is a suggestive fact that Locke, and many more recent Continental psychologists, have found themselves obliged to invoke a mechanical process to account for the aberrations of Thought, the obstructive prepossessions, the frustrations of Reason. This they found in the law of habit, or what we now call Association by Contiguity. But it never occurred to these writers that a process which could go the length of actually producing some ideas and sequences in the mind might safely be trusted to produce others too ”

“ We all immediately recognize, however, that in some minds there is a much greater tendency than in others for the flow of thought to take this form. Those insufferably garrulous old women, those dry and fanciless beings who spare you no detail, however petty, of the facts they are recounting, and upon the thread of whose narrative all the irrelevant items cluster as pertinaciously as the essential ones, the slaves of literal fact, the stumblers over the smallest abrupt step in thought, are figures known to all of us. ”

“ The truth must be admitted that pure Thought works under conditions imposed ab extra. The great law of habit itself—that twenty experiences make us recall a thing better than one, that long indulgence in error makes right thinking almost impossible—seems to have no essential foundation in reason. ”

“ But the reader is requested to remember that in thus trying to explain, by laws of matter, what ideas shall be presented to consciousness at any moment, I expressly repudiate the pretension to explain the form of consciousness itself. Consciousness, as I understand it, is always in the midst of the present aware of the past as that from which the present came; and, out of the materials which the present furnishes, she is always comparing one part with another, to select that which most fits her ends. ”

“ Who can swear that his prejudices and irrational beliefs constitute a less bulky part of his mental furniture than his clarified opinions? It is true that a presiding arbiter seems to sit aloft in the mind, and emphasize the better suggestions into permanence, while it ends by dropping out and leaving unrecorded the confusion. But this is all the difference. The mode of genesis of the worthy and the worthless seems the same. The laws of our actual thinking, of the cogitatum, must account alike for the bad and the good materials on which the arbiter has to decide, for wisdom and for folly. ”

“ In subjective terms we say that the prepotent items are those which appeal most to our interest.
Expressed in brain-terms, the law of interest will be: some one brain-process is always prepotent above its concomitants in arousing action elsewhere.
"Two processes," says Mr. Hodgson, [2] "are constantly going on in redintegration. The one a process of corrosion, melting, decay; the other a process of renewing, arising, becoming. . . . No object of representation remains long before consciousness in the same state, but fades, decays, and becomes indistinct. ”

“ Excitement of peculiar tracts, or peculiar modes of general excitement in the brain leave a sort of tenderness or exalted sensibility behind them which takes days to die away. As long as it lasts, those tracts or those modes are liable to have their activities awakened by causes which at other times might leave them in repose. Hence, recency in experience is a prime factor in determining revival in thought.
Vividness in an original experience may also have the same effect as habit or recency in bringing about likelihood of revival. ”

“ We can not even by careful search see the bridge over which we passed from the heart of one representation to that of the next. In some brains, however, this mode of transition it extremely common. It would be one of the most important of physiological discoveries could we assign the mechanical or chemical difference which makes the thoughts of one brain cling close to Pure Contiguity while those of another shoot about in all the lawless revelry of Similarity. ”

“ Hartley accordingly suggested habit as an all-sufficient explanation, but failed to dispose of the difficulty which comes in when we notice that in the highest flights of Reason habit does not seem the link between one item and the next. Rather are the transitions of genius distinguished by their express defiance of all that is habitual. ”

“ Most of us, however, are better organized than this, and our musings pursue an erratic course, swerving continually into a new direction traced out by the shifting play of interest as it irradiates always some partial item in each complex representation that is evoked. Thus it commonly comes about that we find ourselves thinking at two nearly adjacent moments of things separated by the whole diameter of space and time. ”

“ If a man in his boyhood once talked with Napoleon, any mention of great men or historical events, battles or thrones, or the whirligig of fortune, or islands in the ocean, will be apt to draw to his lips the incidents of that one memorable interview. If the word tooth now suddenly appears on the page before the reader’s eye, there are fifty chances out of a hundred that, if he gives it time to awaken any image, it will be an image of some operation of dentistry in which he has been the sufferer. ”

“ Thus it is that events lived through only once, and in youth, may come in after-years, by reason of their exciting quality or emotional intensity, to serve as types or instances used by our mind to illustrate any and every occurring topic whose interest is most remotely pertinent to theirs. ”

“ Simply because the word that follows the ages has its brain-process awakened not simply by the brain-process of the ages alone, but by it plus the brain-processes of all the words preceding the ages. The word ages at its moment of strongest activity would, per se, indifferently discharge into either "in" or "one." ”

“ Why a single portion of the passing thought should break out from its concert with the rest and act, as we say, on its own hook, why the other parts should become inert, are mysteries which we can ascertain but not explain. ”

“ The intuition they start from is that thought is not a sand-heap of juxtaposed images with associating links outside of them and between them. It is a unitary continuum of which the items, and the logical relations between the items, form alike integral parts, equally imbedded, equally essential, equally interdependent. Any relation may carry us from one item to another, and according as we follow one or the other relation we shall traverse the field of thought in this way or in that, have one train of images or its opposite. ”

“ In spite of the fact, however, that the succession of representations is thus redeemed from perfect indeterminism 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. ”

“ Whatever the difference may be, it is what separates the man of genius from the prosaic creature of habit and routine thinking. Professor Bain, more profusely and cogently than any one else, has illustrated the truth that the leading fact in what we call genius in every department of life is a high development of the power of Similar Association. ”

“ The higher and the lower nerve-centers, then, are subject to one and the same law; and the reason of the law must be in both cases the same. The fact that there are isolated tracts of conduction in all the centers, and that as we pass from below upward the different centers have in the main different characteristic functions, leads to the notion that each function, ideational or motor, is dependent on a certain tract localized somewhere, which tract when once excited may propagate the excitement to other outlying tracts. ”

“ Now, as a matter of fact, things in the brain are much less simple than this. Every elementary tract or process has found itself at different times excited in conjunction with many other tracts or processes, and this by unavoidable outward causes. Which of these others it shall awaken now becomes a problem. Shall b or c be aroused next by the present a? We must make a further postulate, based, however, on the undeniable fact of tension in nerve-tissue, and the summation of excitements, each incomplete or latent in itself, into an open resultant ”

“ Always some ingredient is prepotent over the rest. Its special suggestions or associations in this case will often be different from those which it has in common with the whole group of items; and its tendency to awaken these outlying associates will deflect the path of our reverie. Just as in the original sensible experience our attention focalized itself upon a few of the impressions of the scene before us, so here in the reproduced representation of those impressions the same partiality is shown, and some items emphasized above the rest. ”

“ It thus remains true that to a certain extent, even in those forms of ordinary Mixed Association which lie nearest to Pure Association by Contiguity, which associate of the interesting item shall emerge must be called largely a matter of accident—accident, that is, for our intelligence. ”

“ A fourth factor in tracing the course of reproduction is congruity in emotional tone between the reproduced idea and our mood. The same objects do not recall the same associates when we are cheerful as when we are melancholy. Nothing, in fact, is more striking than our utter inability to keep up trains of joyous imagery when we are depressed in spirits. ”

“ This case helps us to understand why it is that the ordinary spontaneous flow of our ideas does not follow the law of "complete" Association by Contiguity. In no revival of a past experience are all the items of our thought equally and impartially operative in determining what the next thought shall be. ”

“ A habit of this kind once become inveterate, like the manipulations of certain trades, the balancings of the body in standing or walking, the varying pressure of the legs in response to the swayings of a horse’s gait, may go on automatically while the mind concerns itself with far other affairs. ”

“ It will be least obeyed by those minds which have the smallest variety and intensity of interests—those who, by the general flatness and poverty of their aesthetic nature, are kept for ever rotating among the literal sequences of their local and personal history. ”