Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/616

586 reverie, hard to determine beforehand. 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, "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. Those parts of the object, however, which possess an interest, that is, those which are attended by a representation of pleasure or pain, resist this tendency to gradual decay of the whole object. . . . This inequality in the object—some parts, the uninteresting, submitting to decay; others, the interesting parts, resisting it—when it has continued for a certain time, ends in becoming a new object." Only where the interest is diffused equally over all the parts (as in the emotional memory just referred to, where, as all past, they all interest us alike) is this law departed from. 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.

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. Not till we carefully recall each step of our cogitation do we see how naturally we came by Hodgson’s law to pass from one to the other. Thus, for instance, after looking at my clock just now, I found myself thinking of Senator Bayard’s recent resolution about our legal-tender notes. The clock called up the image of the man who had repaired its gong. He suggested the jeweler’s shop where I had last seen him; that shop, some shirt-studs which I had bought there; they, the value of gold and its recent decline; the latter, the equal value of greenbacks, and this naturally the question of how long they were to last, and of the Bayard proposition. Each of these images offered various points of interest. Those which formed the turning-points of my thought are easily assigned. The gong was momentarily the most interesting part of the clock, because, from having begun with a beautiful tone, it had become discordant and aroused disappointment and perplexity. But for this, the clock might have suggested the friend who gave it to me, or any one of a thousand circumstances connected with it. The jeweler’s shop suggested the studs,