When you look at a building, you receive a number and variety of simultaneous sensations, all of which, by the exercise of a causal judgment, you at once ascribe to the same point in space. From this time on the same flowing together of sensations from the same place will always mean for you that particular
material thing, that particular building. You have a sensation of yellow, and forthwith a causal judgment tells you that something outside of your body produced it. But it would be a pretty difficult matter for you to know just what this something might be if there were not other simultaneous sensations of a different kind coming from the same point in space. So when you see a yellow color and at the same time experience a certain familiar taste and a certain softness of touch, all arising from the same source, then by a series of classifying judgments you put all these different sensations together, assign them to the same object, and give that object a name—for example, "butter."
The Archives of the Mind
This process of grouping and classification that we are describing under the name of "classifying judgments" is no haphazard affair. It is carried on in strict compliance with certain well-defined laws.
These laws prescribe and determine the workings of your mind just as absolutely as the laws of physics control the operations of material forces.
While each of these laws has its own special province and jurisdiction, yet all have one element in common, and that is that they all relate to those mental operations by which sense-perceptions, causal judgments, and even classifying judgments, past, present and imaginative, are grouped, bound together, arranged, catalogued and
pigeonholed in the archives of the mind.
These laws, taken collectively, are therefore called the Laws of Association.