|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 21
In my last talk, in treating of Habit, I chiefly had in mind our _motor_
habits,--habits of external conduct. But our thinking and feeling
processes are also largely subject to the law of habit, and one result
of this is a phenomenon which you all know under the name of 'the
association of ideas.' To that phenomenon I ask you now to turn.
You remember that consciousness is an ever-flowing stream of objects,
feelings, and impulsive tendencies. We saw already that its phases or
pulses are like so many fields or waves, each field or wave having
usually its central point of liveliest attention, in the shape of the
most prominent object in our thought, while all around this lies a
margin of other objects more dimly realized, together with the margin of
emotional and active tendencies which the whole entails. Describing the
mind thus in fluid terms, we cling as close as possible to nature. At
first sight, it might seem as if, in the fluidity of these successive
waves, everything is indeterminate. But inspection shows that each wave
has a constitution which can be to some degree explained by the
constitution of the waves just passed away. And this relation of the
wave to its predecessors is expressed by the two fundamental 'laws of
association,' so-called, of which the first is named the Law of
Contiguity, the second that of Similarity.
The _Law of Contiguity_ tells us that objects thought of in the coming
wave are such as in some previous experience were _next_ to the objects
represented in the wave that is passing away. The vanishing objects were
once formerly their neighbors in the mind. When you recite the alphabet
or your prayers, or when the sight of an object reminds you of its name,
or the name reminds you of the object, it is through the law of
contiguity that the terms are suggested to the mind.
The _Law of Similarity_ says that, when contiguity fails to describe
what happens, the coming objects will prove to _resemble_ the going
objects, even though the two were never experienced together before. In
our 'flights of fancy,' this is frequently the case.
If, arresting ourselves in the flow of reverie, we ask the question,
"How came we to be thinking of just this object now?" we can almost
always trace its presence to some previous object which has introduced
it to the mind, according to one or the other of these laws. The entire
routine of our memorized acquisitions, for example, is a consequence of
nothing but the Law of Contiguity. The words of a poem, the formulas of
trigonometry, the facts of history, the properties of material things,
are all known to us as definite systems or groups of objects which
cohere in an order fixed by innumerable iterations, and of which any one
part reminds us of the others. In dry and prosaic minds, almost all the
mental sequences flow along these lines of habitual routine repetition
and suggestion.
In witty, imaginative minds, on the other hand, the routine is broken
through with ease at any moment; and one field of mental objects will
suggest another with which perhaps in the whole history of human
thinking it had never once before been coupled. The link here is usually
some _analogy_ between the objects successively thought of,--an analogy
often so subtle that, although we feel it, we can with difficulty
analyze its ground; as where, for example, we find something masculine
in the color red and something feminine in the color pale blue, or
where, of three human beings' characters, one will remind us of a cat,
another of a dog, the third perhaps of a cow.
* * * * *
Psychologists have of course gone very deeply into the question of what
the causes of association may be; and some of them have tried to show
that contiguity and similarity are not two radically diverse laws, but
that either presupposes the presence of the other. I myself am disposed
to think that the phenomena of association depend on our cerebral
constitution, and are not immediate consequences of our being rational
beings. In other words, when we shall have become disembodied spirits,
it may be that our trains of consciousness will follow different laws.
These questions are discussed in the books on psychology, and I hope
that some of you will be interested in following them there. But I will,
on the present occasion, ignore them entirely; for, as teachers, it is
the _fact_ of association that practically concerns you, let its grounds
be spiritual or cerebral, or what they may, and let its laws be
reducible, or non-reducible, to one. Your pupils, whatever else they
are, are at any rate little pieces of associating machinery. Their
education consists in the organizing within them of determinate
tendencies to associate one thing with another,--impressions with
consequences, these with reactions, those with results, and so on
indefinitely. The more copious the associative systems, the completer
the individual's adaptations to the world.
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|