Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/613

Rh In case of some one of these preceding words—"heir," for example—having an intensely strong association with some brain-tracts entirely disjoined in experience from the poem of "Locksley Hall"—in case the reciter, for instance, was tremulously awaiting the opening of a will which might make him a millionaire or leave him penniless—it is probable that the path of discharge through the words of the poem would be suddenly interrupted at the word "heir." His emotional interest in that word would be such that its own special associations would prevail over the combined ones of the other words. He would, as we say, be abruptly reminded of his personal situation, and the poem would lapse altogether from his thoughts.

The writer of these pages has every year to learn the names of a large number of students who sit in alphabetical order in a lecture-room. On meeting one in the street, early in the year, the face hardly ever recalls the name, but it may recall the place of its owner in the lecture-room, his neighbors’ faces, and consequently his general alphabetical position; and then, usually as the common associate of all these combined data, the student’s name surges up in my mind.

A father wishes to show to some guests the progress of his rather dull child in Kindergarten instruction. Holding the knife upright on the table, he says, "What do you call that, my boy?" "I calls it a knife, I does," is the sturdy reply, from which the child can not be induced to swerve by any alteration in the form of question, until the father, recollecting that in the Kindergarten a pencil was used, and not a knife, draws a long one from his pocket, holds it in the same way, and then gets the wished-for answer, "I calls it vertical." All the concomitants of the Kindergarten experience had to recombine their effect before the word "vertical" could be reawakened.

Professor Bain, in his chapters on Compound Association, has treated in a minute and exhaustive way of this type of mental sequence, and what he has done so well need not be here repeated.

The ideal working of the law of compound association, were it unmodified by any extraneous influence, would be such as to keep the mind in a perpetual treadmill of concrete reminiscences from which no detail could be omitted. Suppose, for example, we begin by thinking of a certain dinner-party. The only thing which all the components of the dinner-party could combine to recall would be the first concrete occurrence which ensued upon it. All the details of this occurrence could in turn only combine to awaken the next following occurrence and so on. If a, b, c, d, e, for instance, be the elementary nerve-tracts excited by the last act of the dinner-party, call this act A, and l, m, n, o, p be those of walking home through the frosty night, which we may call B, then the thought of A must awaken that of B, because a, b, c, d, e, will each and all discharge into l through the paths by which their original discharge took place. Similarly they will discharge into m, n, o, and p, and these latter tracts will each