Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/619

Rh 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. Storm, darkness, war, images of disease, poverty, and perishing afflict unremittingly the imaginations of melancholiacs. 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. Few novels so overflow with joyous animal spirits as "The Three Guardsmen" of Dumas. Yet it may awaken in the mind of a reader depressed with sea-sickness (as the writer can personally testify) a most dismal and woful consciousness of the cruelty and carnage which heroes like Athos, Porthos, and Aramis make themselves guilty of.

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. 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. To take the instance of the clock given on page 586. Why did the jeweler’s shop suggest the shirt-studs rather than a chain which I had bought there more recently, which has cost more, and whose sentimental associations were much more interesting? Both chain and studs had excited brain-tracts simultaneously with the excitement of others by the general aspect of the shop. The only reason why the nerve-stream from the shop-tract switched off into the stud-tract rather than the chain-tract must be that the stud-tract happened at that moment to lie more open, either because of some accidental alteration in its nutrition or because the incipient sub-conscious tensions of the brain as a whole had so distributed their equilibrium that it was more unstable here than in the chain-tract. Any reader’s introspection will easily furnish similar instances. It thus remains true that to a certain extent, even in those