(6) Associative tendencies decay with time; yet we have said that the practised speaker drops his speech, and lets his brain incubate it. Is there not a contradiction here? Consider the two cases carefully.
(7) Can you give instances, from your own recent experience, of the working of initial and terminal inhibition?
(8) Later writers have added to the four ‘laws’ of Aristotle (similarity, contrast, succession, coadjacency) various other laws: means and end, cause and effect, whole and part, thing and properties, sign and thing signified, and so on. Can you suggest any reason for these additions? Can you give an instance under every ‘law,’ and reduce it psychologically to our own law of association? Try to get real instances, taken from your own or your friends’ experience.
(9) Trace the connection of mental processes in your own case as follows. An experimenter prepares a set of simple pictures, and arranges to show them for 3 sec. by removal and replacement of a cardboard screen. Sit at a convenient distance, and let the stimulus have its way with you; report your mental processes as they come; the experimenter writes down what you say. Try to give the facts, and not to express yourself in meanings. Do not be discouraged if the task seems, at first, to be too difficult.
(10) (a) Can you give any reason why your work might be unusually good when you are feeling a little tired? (b) What is the relation of interest to practice?
(11) State, in your own words, what the doctrine of association professes to do, and what cardinal mistake it falls into when it tries to do it.
(12) (a) Write out, in common-sense terms, the facts that the law of mental connection has to translate into psychological language. Next, write out, in your own words, the law itself. Now compare your formulation with that of the text: do they tally? If not, do you understand the difference? Do not be satisfied to leave any point obscure. (b) Show that the law of mental connection does justice, as the older ‘laws’ of association do not, to the facts of § 35. (c) You often read in fiction of situations whose every detail makes an indelible impression; you will find one described, for instance, in Mrs. Deland’s ‘Philip and his Wife,’ ch. xxix. Is the writer’s psychology sound?