6. What plans and ideals have you formed, and what ones are you at present following? Can you describe the process by which your plans or ideals change? Do you ever try to put yourself in the other person's place?
7. Take some fanciful unreality which your imagination has constructed and see whether you can select from it familiar elements from actual experiences.
8. What use do you make of imagination in the common round of duties in your daily life? What are you doing to improve your imagination?
CHAPTER X
ASSOCIATION
Whence came the thought that occupies you this moment, and what determines the next that is to follow? Introspection reveals no more interesting fact concerning our minds than that our thoughts move in a connected and orderly array and not in a hit-and-miss fashion. Our mental states do not throng the stream of consciousness like so many pieces of wood following each other at random down a rushing current, now this one ahead, now that. On the contrary, our thoughts come, one after the other, as they are beckoned or caused. The thought now in the focal point of your consciousness appeared because it sprouted out of the one just preceding it; and the present thought, before it departs, will determine its successor and lead it upon the scene. This is to say that our thought stream possesses not only a continuity, but also a unity; it has coherence and system. This coherence and system, which operates in accordance with definite laws, is brought about by what the psychologist calls association.
1. THE NATURE OF ASSOCIATION
We may define association, then, as the tendency among our thoughts to form such a system of bonds with each other that the objects of consciousness are vitally connected both (1) as they exist at any given moment, and (2) as they occur in succession in the mental stream.
The Neural Basis of Association.—The association of thoughts—ideas, images, memory—or of a situation with its response, rests primarily on a neural basis. Association is the result of habit working in neurone groups. Its fundamental law is stated by James as follows: "When two elementary brain-processes have been active together or in immediate succession, one of them, on recurring, tends to propagate its excitement into the other." This is but a technical statement of the simple fact that nerve currents flow most easily over the neurone connections that they have already used.