or vividness of presentation to your consciousness.
The grouping together of sensations into integral ideas is one step in the complicated mental processes by which useful knowledge is acquired. But the associative processes go much beyond this.
How Experience is Systematized
We also compare the different objects of present and past experience. We carefully and thoroughly catalogue them into groups, divisions and subdivisions for convenient and ready reference. This we do by the processes of memory, of association and of discrimination, previously referred to.
How Language Is Simplified
Through these processes our knowledge of the world, derived from the whole vast field of experience, is unified
and systematized. Through these processes is order realized from chaos. Through these processes it comes about that not only individual thought, but the communication of thought from one person to another, is vastly simplified. Language is enabled to deal with ideas instead of with isolated sense-perceptions. The single word "horse" suffices to convey a thought that could not be adequately set forth in a page-long enumeration of disconnected sense-perceptions.
The associative process covers a wide range. It includes, for example, not only the simple definition of an aggregate of sense-perceptions, as "horse" or "cow"; it includes as well the inferential process of abstract reasoning.
Processes of Reasoning and Reflection