So much is this true, that if we knew every detail of your past experience from your first infantile sensation, and
knew also just what you are thinking of at the present moment, we could predict to a mathematical certainty just what ideas would next appear on the kaleidoscopic screen of your thoughts. This is due to laws that govern the association of ideas.
These laws are, in substance, that the way in which judgments and ideas are classified and stored away, and the order in which they are brought forth into consciousness depends upon what other judgments and ideas they have been associated with most habitually, recently, closely and vividly.
There are, therefore, four Prime Laws of Association—the Law of Habit, the Law of Recency, the Law of Contiguity and the Law of Vividness.
Every idea that can possibly arise in your thoughts has its vast array of associates, to each of which it is linked by some one element in common. Thus, you see or dream of a yellow flower, and the one property of yellowness links the idea of that flower with everything you ever before saw or dreamed of that was similarly hued.
The Bonds of Intellect
But the yellow-flower thought is not tied to all these countless associates by bonds of equal strength. And which associate shall come next to mind is determined by the four Prime Laws of Association.
The Law of Habit requires that frequency of association be the one test to determine what idea shall next come into consciousness, while the Laws of
Recency, Contiguity and Vividness emphasize respectively recency of occurrence, closeness in point of space and intensity of impression. Which law and which element shall prevail is all a question of degree.