We know that the theory of the association of ideas has been reduced to two fundamental laws—that of contiguity and that of resemblance. I may remark, without insisting on the fact, that they are not of the same nature; the first, being purely mechanical, the result of experience, while the second supposes, in addition to this, a certain degree of mental labour, for a complete correspondence between two states is rarely met with, and can only be grasped in consequence of a dissociation or abstraction operating on the raw materials. These two laws are purely intellectual; they are regulative principles deduced from facts, nothing more. They are rather descriptive than explanatory. They reveal the mechanism, but not the motive force. They suppose something beyond, unless we admit that ideas are psychic atoms endowed with some mysterious attraction or affinity. With regard to the determining reasons, they are dumb. Now it cannot be doubted that in many cases (not all) the cause of the association is to be found in a permanent or momentary state of the feelings.
The writers who have pointed out this influence (often efficacious though latent) have conceived this superior law, which might be called the Law of Feeling, in two different ways, some as absolute and universal, others as partial and local. I take my stand among the latter.
1. Fouillée (as also, it seems, Horwicz) has maintained the former thesis. “The association of ideas presupposes that of the emotions, and, with the latter, that of the impulses. The dominant impulse awakens, by association, the secondary impulses tending in the same direction. The tie which unites them is the unity of an aim in relation to which the impulses are medium, the unity of an effect in relation to which they are co-operating forces.... The laws of association and contrast are what dominate the association of the feelings” (loc. cit., p. 221). I shall not be suspected of hostility to the essential spirit of this thesis, since the present work is only one long vindication of the primordial nature of tendencies. But unless we are led astray by the mirage of unity at any price, it is impossible to admit that every association supposes an emotional factor as a determining reason. Not to speak of the numerous cases resulting from contiguity, in which the part played by the feelings is very doubtful, I find an important category of purely intellectual associations, where the intervention of the feelings appears to me impossible to verify. Is it likely that the mathematician and the metaphysician who connect together a long series of abstractions have an emotional state as the support and vehicle of their thought, whether the latter be discursive or constructive? I do not see, in theory or in fact, any reason for admitting this, unless we wish to involve the love of truth; and in any case this would only be a primum movens, not the direct and immediate cause of the associations.
2. The influence of emotional states must be stated as a principal, but not an exclusive cause. It is summed up in what Shadworth Hodgson has called the “Law of Interest.” In a past event, everything is not equally interesting; in its revival, all the elements are not equally active, the most emotional bringing the others with them. “Two processes are constantly going on in redintegrations. The one a process of corrosion, melting, decay; the other a process of renewing, arising, becoming.... Those parts of the object, however, which possess an interest, resist this tendency to gradual decay of the whole object.”[[111]] Coleridge rightly says that “The true practical general law of association is this: that whatever makes certain parts of a total impression more vivid or distinct than the rest will determine the mind to recall these, in preference to others equally linked together by the common condition of contemporaneity or continuity. But the will itself, by confining and intensifying the attention, may arbitrarily give vividness or distinctness to any object whatsoever.”[[112]] The power attributed by Coleridge to the attention and the will finally resolves itself into an emotional state as ultimate cause, and from it alone can an increase of intensity be derived.
I shall insist no further on these generalities, as it will be more instructive to determine by means of a few details the influence of the emotional life on the memory. To this end I shall divide our study into two parts, the function of unconscious feeling, and that of the conscious feelings.
I.
It is not always easy to determine positively the degree in which unconscious feeling influences the memory in order to awaken it, or to connect ideas with one another. I have purposely employed the vague term “unconscious feeling” as prejudging nothing with regard to its nature. We may form any conception we like of it, either considering it as purely physiological or assigning to it a psychological character—that of a consciousness diminishing to infinity. Both these opinions have their partisans, but this does not matter as regards the following considerations. In this unconscious feeling I distinguish three strata, passing from the deepest upwards, from the more obscure to the less obscure.
1. Hereditary or ancestral unconsciousness. I mention this merely for the sake of completeness. It would consist in the influence of certain modes of feeling, inherited and fixed in a race, which might, without our knowing it, exercise some sway over our associations. Under this form, at least, it appears to me extremely hypothetical. Laycock[[113]] (1844), one of the founders of the physiology of the unconscious, attempts to explain by this means certain national and individual tastes; the Hungarians are supposed to like plains because these appeal to the ancestral recollection of the Mongolian steppes, their primæval home. Herbert Spencer, who, however, has not occupied himself much with the influence of sentiments on the association of ideas, says incidentally that, in the impression produced by a landscape, “along with the immediate sensations, there are partially excited the myriads of sensations that have been in time past received from objects such as those presented; further, there are also excited certain deeper, but now vague combinations of states which were organised in the race during barbarous times, when its pleasurable activities were chiefly among the woods and waters.”[[114]] Schneider assumes this ancestral revivification in every æsthetic perception. We shall return to this subject in Part II. The predatory tastes of primitive man would explain certain agreeable associations (e.g., the pleasure of constructing a bloodthirsty drama) which contrast with the habits of civilised man.
These facts seem to me reducible to a single explanation. There are in every man latent tendencies, which may remain latent throughout his life, but may also be awakened and revealed by some accidental occurrence. They might be called hereditary, since they are found in an inherited organism; but it would be quite as correct to call them innate. In any case, it is very difficult to prove that they are a survival, and above all a resurrection of once existing tendencies.
2. Personal unconsciousness arising from cœnæsthesia, i.e., from the internal sensations collectively. This imperceptibly brings us down to consciousness, from the moment when the affective state can be verified without induction. A certain disposition, a certain manner of feeling, is the direct and immediate cause of association. It is permanent or transitory. If permanent, it answers to the temperament or disposition. As the subject is cheerful, melancholy, erotic, or ambitious, an unconscious selection is exercised on the ideas arising in consciousness; an artist and a practical man, in face of the same object, have two totally distinct modes of association. If transitory, it corresponds, in the same individual, to states of health and sickness, to changes of age; each one of these distinct states produces a distinct selection. The unity of certain dreams, in spite of the apparent difference of associations, has its easily discovered cause in an organic or affective disposition—fatigue, depression, oppression, circulatory or digestive troubles, sexual excitement. The simplicity and frequency of these facts will permit us to dispense with insisting upon them.