[461] This is the formula which Merkel thinks he has verified (if I understand him aright) by his experiments by method 4.
[462] Elsas: Ueber die Psychophysik (1856), p. 41. When the pans of a balance are already loaded, but in equilibrium, it takes a proportionally larger weight added to one of them to incline the beam.
[CHAPTER XIV.][463]
ASSOCIATION.
After discrimination, association! Already in the last chapter I have had to invoke, in order to explain the improvement of certain discriminations by practice, the 'association' of the objects to be distinguished, with other more widely differing ones. It is obvious that the advance of our knowledge must consist of both operations; for objects at first appearing as wholes are analyzed into parts, and objects appearing separately are brought together and appear as new compound wholes to the mind. Analysis and synthesis are thus the incessantly alternating mental activities, a stroke of the one preparing the way for a stroke of the other, much as, in walking, a man's two legs are alternately brought into use, both being indispensable for any orderly advance.
The manner in which trains of imagery and consideration follow each other through our thinking, the restless flight of one idea before the next, the transitions our minds make between things wide as the poles asunder, transitions which at first sight startle us by their abruptness, but which, when scrutinized closely, often reveal intermediating links of perfect naturalness and propriety—all this magical, imponderable streaming has from time immemorial excited the admiration of all whose attention happened to be caught by its omnipresent mystery. And it has furthermore challenged the race of philosophers to banish something of the mystery by formulating the process in simpler terms. The problem which the philosophers have set themselves is that of ascertaining principles of connection between the thoughts which thus appear to sprout one out of the other, whereby their peculiar succession or coexistence may be explained.
But immediately an ambiguity arises: which sort of connection is meant? connection thought-of, or connection between thoughts? These are two entirely different things, and only in the case of one of them is there any hope of finding 'principles.' The jungle of connections thought of can never be formulated simply. Every conceivable connection may be thought of—of coexistence, succession, resemblance, contrast, contradiction, cause and effect, means and end, genus and species, part and whole, substance and property, early and late, large and small, landlord and tenant, master and servant,—Heaven knows what, for the list is literally inexhaustible. The only simplification which could possibly be aimed at would be the reduction of the relations to a smaller number of types, like those which such authors as Kant and Renouvier call the 'categories' of the understanding.[464] According as we followed one category or another we should sweep, with our thought, through the world in this way or in that. And all the categories would be logical, would be relations of reason. They would fuse the items into a continuum. Were this the sort of connection sought between one moment of our thinking and another, our chapter might end here. For the only summary description of these infinite possibilities of transition, is that they are all acts of reason, and that the mind proceeds from one object to another by some rational path of connection. The trueness of this formula is only equalled by its sterility, for psychological purposes. Practically it amounts to simply referring the inquirer to the relations between facts or things, and to telling him that his thinking follows them.
But as a matter of fact, his thinking only sometimes follows them, and these so-called 'transitions of reason' are far from being all alike reasonable. If pure thought runs all our trains, why should she run some so fast and some so slow, some through dull flats and some through gorgeous scenery, some to mountain-heights and jewelled mines, others through dismal swamps and darkness?—and run some off the track altogether, and into the wilderness of lunacy? Why do we spend years straining after a certain scientific or practical problem, but all in vain—thought refusing to evoke the solution we desire? And why, some day, walking in the street with our attention miles away from that quest, does the answer saunter into our minds as carelessly as if it had never been called for—suggested, possibly, by the flowers on the bonnet of the lady in front of us, or possibly by nothing that we can discover? If reason can give us relief then, why did she not do so earlier?