is association by similarity between objects or thoughts or feelings which are called similar.
The external sort of association ("by contiguity") is evidently described (not explained) by our law of association; the connection between a psychic phenomenon, x1, and that which follows it, y1, is such as implied in the facts that they are respectively identical with a preceding x and y, which were successive or coexistent. Suppose now that I look at my opal ring and then think of a certain April sunset and of the evening landscape, though I did not own the ring last April and have had no continuous or simultaneous consciousness of ring and sky. What, in effect, is the link between these thoughts of the stone and of that evening in the country? It is evidently the faint flush of the opal which suggests the rosy color of the April sky and then the color of the deeper-toned clouds, the shadows on the hillside, the chirp of the birds and all the delights of spring scenery. But this differs in one point only from the cases of external or “contiguity” association. Clouds, birds, trees, and hills were simultaneously or successively perceived, on that April evening; the one connection which is not an external one is that between the rosy ring and the rose-colored cloud; and this is a case not of the connection between two succeeding objects of consciousness, but of the persistence of one. When I look at my ring, I have a complex object of consciousness (wxy), including oval form, many colors, remembered impenetrability and smoothness. Many parts of this complex object of consciousness disappear, but I remain conscious of this one quality, pinkness; the accentuated thought of it is followed by the thought of the other qualities of a cloud, in accordance with the ordinary law of association; and the thought of the cloud is succeeded in the same way, by the images of sky, of trees, and of hills. Or, in symbolic terms, the object of consciousness wxy is followed by yza. This persistence of the identical factor[1] (the y common to wxy and to yza) is that which distinguishes (so-called) association by similarity from association by con-
- ↑ The identical factor, a quality or combination of qualities, is of course a permanent relation (or permanent relations), a “universal.”
