Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/609

Rh as if it had never been called for—suggested, possibly, by the flowers on the bonnet of the lady in front of us, or possibly by nothing that we can discover? If Reason can give us relief then, why did she not do so earlier?

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. The business of pure Thought is with Truth—the number of experiences ought to have nothing to do with her hold of it; and she ought by right to be able to hug it all the closer, after years wasted out of its presence. Such arrangements seem quite fantastic and arbitrary, but nevertheless are part of the very bone and marrow of our minds. Reason is only one out of a thousand possibilities in the thinking of each of us. Who can count all the silly fancies, the grotesque suppositions, the utterly irrelevant reflections he makes in the course of a day? 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. The laws of the arbiter, of the cogitandum, of what we ought to think, are to the former as the laws of ethics are to those of history. Who but an Hegelian historian ever pretended that reason in action was per se a sufficient explanation of the political changes in Europe?

There are, then, mechanical conditions on which Thought depends, and which, to say the least, determine the order in which is presented the content or material for her comparisons, selections, and decisions. 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; and that those habitual associations which further thought may come from the same mechanical source as those which hinder it. 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