however, never runs backwards, an anagram is never formed out of a well understood word without voluntary effort.”[1]
According to this conception, therefore, the associative threads, which hold together a remembered series, are spun not merely between each member and its immediate successor, but beyond intervening members to every member which stands to it in any close temporal relation. The strength of the threads varies with the distance of the members, but even the weaker of them must be considered as relatively of considerable significance.
The acceptance or rejection of this conception is clearly of great importance for our view of the inner connection of mental events, of the richness and complexity of their groupings and organisation. But it is clearly quite idle to contend about the matter if observation is limited to conscious mental life, to the registration of that which whirls around by chance on the surface of the sea of life.
For, according to the hypothesis, the threads which connect one member to its immediate successor although not the only one spun, are, however, stronger than the others. Consequently, they are, in general, as far as appearances in consciousness are concerned, the important ones, and so the only ones to be observed.
On the other hand, the methods which lie at the basis of the researches already described permit the discovery of connections of even less strength. This is done by artificially strengthening these connections until they reach a definite and uniform level of reproducibility. I have, therefore, carried on according to this method a rather large number of researches to test experimentally
- ↑ Herbart, Lehrb. z. Psychol., Sect. 29. A similar “pleasing” view, as he calls it, was developed by Lotze, Metaphysik (1879) p. 527, with the modification that he attempts to eliminate the notion of varying strength of the ideas, which view he rejects. In accordance with the view mentioned first above, he sees the real reason for a faithful reproduction of a series of ideas in the fact that association is made only from one link to the following link. Accordingly, he teaches, in his Lectures on Psychology (p. 22), “Any two ideas, regardless of content, are associated when they are produced either simultaneously or in immediate succession—i.e., without an intervening link. And upon this can be based without further artifice the special ease with which we reproduce a series of ideas in their proper order but not out of that order. By “further artifice” he seems to mean Herbart’s attempt at an arrangement.
