Page:Psychology and preaching.djvu/70

 52 PSYCHOLOGY AND PREACHING

organizing his own mental system, which will be formed under the control of the individualizing influences just dis cussed. The system of ideas growing up as a result of the differentiating influences at work upon him operates as a selecting principle, determining what ideas out of the gen eral fund available for him he will actually appropriate, and also the particular relations in which he will organize them in his own mind ; and the availability of an increasing store of other men s thoughts simply multiplies the number of individual permutations possible and also the possible range of variation of these individual combinations. One could arrange a thousand bricks into many structural forms which would be very unlike one another; but a million bricks are capable of a far greater number of structural combinations each of which would be still more unique. So with the units of the mental life. Of course, there is much that is common in the experiences of men and, therefore, much that is common to their intellectual systems ; but this com mon factor, while it may grow absolutely larger, must grow relatively smaller in the continuous development of social life.

2. The effect of the differentiation upon meaning. We have seen that the total meaning of a mental image is deter mined by its particular setting in the total system. The group of images with which it is immediately connected give its specific meaning; but the entire system constitutes the background of its significance. The whole system gives to each image a certain perspective through which it is viewed. It thus bears, in addition to its specific content of meaning, a certain atmosphere of meaning imparted to it by its general relations in the whole body of one s thought. These general relations may not come into the focus of con sciousness but only into the fringe, but are nevertheless im portant elements of meaning.

It is apparent, then, that to persons whose mental systems are differently constituted the same image must have a somewhat different meaning. In so far as the systems

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