which comes."[1] I have used the expression "cerebral correlate" to avoid such an implication of cerebral causality as is not justifiable in a description which is in terms of consciousness. One has no right to deny the possibility of a physiological cause of the phenomena of individual consciousness, but neither can one properly assert it.
These classes cannot be distinguished by hard and fast lines of separation. Whether any case occurs of absolutely total association, in which every factor of an object of consciousness has its correlate in a succeeding one, is in fact very doubtful. But if the sight of a house is followed by the thought of its architect this approximates to a case of total, desistent association; if my attention concentrates itself upon the porch of the house, so that my next thought is of the person with whom I talked as I stood there, an hour ago, the association, this time, is still desistent (of "contiguity"), but partial.
The classification of persistent association is a similar one. Its distinctive feature, as we have so often said, is the persistence of an identical quality, or group of qualities, which is thus a common factor of both terms. So, in total persistent association, the whole of the first object of consciousness remains as part of the second, as in the frequent instances when the sight of an empty room is followed by the thought of the same room filled. Cases of total, persistent association are often instances of exact memory, involving (practically) perfect identity except of time. Wordsworth’s Gipsies offers a good example:
Yet are they here the same unbroken knot
Of human beings in the selfsame spot!
Men, women, children, yea, the frame
Of the whole spectacle the same.
Such cases might seem to be instances of mere persistence, involving no association, were it not that the recognition of past time is always connected with the memory of some thing, some feeling or some effort, which does not “recur” in the present. One would never differentiate the present from the past percep-
- ↑ Psych., I., p. 581.
