Of course, this has its good side as well as its bad one.  As we become permanent drunkards by so many separate drinks, so we become saints in the moral, and authorities and experts in the practical and scientific spheres, by so many separate acts and hours of work.  Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be.  If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working day, he may safely leave the final result to itself.  He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation, in whatever pursuit he may have singled out.  Silently, between all the details of his business, the power of judging in all that class of matter will have built itself up within him as a possession that will never pass away.  Young people should know this truth in advance.  The ignorance of it has probably engendered more discouragement and faint-heartedness in youths embarking on arduous careers than all other causes put together.

IX.  THE ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS

In my last talk, in treating of Habit, I chiefly had in mind our motor habits,—­habits of external conduct.  But our thinking and feeling processes are also largely subject to the law of habit, and one result of this is a phenomenon which you all know under the name of ’the association of ideas.’  To that phenomenon I ask you now to turn.

You remember that consciousness is an ever-flowing stream of objects, feelings, and impulsive tendencies.  We saw already that its phases or pulses are like so many fields or waves, each field or wave having usually its central point of liveliest attention, in the shape of the most prominent object in our thought, while all around this lies a margin of other objects more dimly realized, together with the margin of emotional and active tendencies which the whole entails.  Describing the mind thus in fluid terms, we cling as close as possible to nature.  At first sight, it might seem as if, in the fluidity of these successive waves, everything is indeterminate.  But inspection shows that each wave has a constitution which can be to some degree explained by the constitution of the waves just passed away.  And this relation of the wave to its predecessors is expressed by the two fundamental ’laws of association,’ so-called, of which the first is named the Law of Contiguity, the second that of Similarity.

The Law of Contiguity tells us that objects thought of in the coming wave are such as in some previous experience were next to the objects represented in the wave that is passing away.  The vanishing objects were once formerly their neighbors in the mind.  When you recite the alphabet or your prayers, or when the sight of an object reminds you of its name, or the name reminds you of the object, it is through the law of contiguity that the terms are suggested to the mind.