Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/470

MB. JAMES WARD'S " PSYCHOLOGY ". 469 1 That is to say, there is such a thing as revival by similarity,, but this is not a process of association. If he means that ' association ' is not an apt word for the suggestion of simi- lars, I quite agree with him. That there is nothing to be said, however, as to the workings of Similarity as such, I could not admit without a degree of self-stultification that I am not yet equal to. Meantime, I must endeavour to follow his account of his one recognised law of association Con- tiguity. He re-introduces his memory-continuum to get out of the enormous difficulty of conceiving presentations origi- nally distinct and isolated becoming eventually linked to- gether. For contiguity he would substitute " continuity," and inquire into the process of integration, in all which I can see only a change of terms for the same inevitable fact : a, b, c, d, began by being isolated presentations, they end by being linked or connected into a series. Still there are considerations of some subtlety in the matter. Take, first, succession. Why does not this association work backwards ? This, I should say, is really an ultimate fact : the order of reproduction is the order of original occurrence, or the order in which they were originally attended to. We could learn the alphabet backward, but only by repeating it backwards as often as forwards. Next as to the simultaneous. This can be resolved into succession, seeing that to take in a complicated subject we must cross and recross the field of view until the parts cohere by being made to succeed each other in turn. So far we are supposing the memory of one continuous and homogeneous scene as a fixed row of houses, a strain of music, or a verbal sequence. When, to use Mr. Ward's language, we have portions of different continua e.g., sights and sounds or non-adjacent parts of the same, the integra- tion or association makes a new continuum or train, in which the two remote things are adjacent parts ; in fact, are brought together from a distance, and rendered continuous. Here the movements of attention are particularly involved ; to unite a house with a name we must attend mentally first to the one, and then to the other ; and the influences that put attention in motion are then all-important. Interest is the main stimulus, but something may be done at first by mere intensity ; the roar of a cannon and the flash at its mouth are doubtless associated by the mere intensity of the primary impressions. But the movements of atten- tion, forming the connexion between one representation and another in the memory-train, are important as constituting " temporal signs," by which are meant marks of the order of