Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/610

580 are the transitions of genius distinguished by their express defiance of all that is habitual.

This led to the erection of other laws to supply the gaps in explanation left by the law of habit alone. 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.

Mr. Hodgson, ablest of recent (if not of all) English philosophers, supplements Bain’s laws by an important principle, that of Interest.

And every one before whose consciousness, when falling asleep, trains of faces and other disconnected images are wont to pass, and who, moreover, after his attention has once been called to the subject, surprises vestiges of the same process at work during his waking hours, in the form of a sort of meteoric shower of random images, visual or verbal, which cross the main current of thought, but are so faint that they ordinarily arrest no attention and are forthwith forgotten —every such person, I say, will plead for the admission of a principle of spontaneity or accidental arousal, along with the principles already mentioned.

In the pages that follow I accept all these laws save that of contrast; and that I do not reject, but simply ignore and disregard on the present occasion. I try to show how they all may follow from certain variations in a fundamental process of activity in the brain. In particular I reduce Contiguous and Similar Associations to one, by exhibiting their most pronounced forms as mere extremes of a common mode. 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. These peculiarities of consciousness were referred to above, when it was spoken of as a “presiding arbiter.” I am wholly unable to picture this strange discriminating industry, this bringing of things together in order to keep them apart, this setting of ends and choosing from equal possibilities, in terms of any physical process whatever. The laws of association to be treated of here might, for aught we can see, be true in a creature wholly devoid of memory or comparison. Each of his ideas would vanish in the act of awakening its successor; his mind (if such it