You just saw how a single exciting word may call up its own associates prepotently, and deflect our whole train of thinking from the previous track.  The fact is that every portion of the field tends to call up its own associates; but, if these associates be severally different, there is rivalry, and as soon as one or a few begin to be effective the others seem to get siphoned out, as it were, and left behind.  Seldom, however, as in our example, does the process seem to turn round a single item in the mental field, or even round the entire field that is immediately in the act of passing.  It is a matter of constellation, into which portions of fields that are already past especially seem to enter and have their say.  Thus, to go back to ‘Locksley Hall,’ each word as I recite it in its due order is suggested not solely by the previous word now expiring on my lips, but it is rather the effect of all the previous words, taken together, of the verse.  “Ages,” for example, calls up “in the foremost files of time,” when preceded by “I, the heir of all the”—­; but, when preceded by “for I doubt not through the,”—­it calls up “one increasing purpose runs.”  Similarly, if I write on the blackboard the letters A B C D E F,... they probably suggest to you G H I....  But, if I write A B A D D E F, if they suggest anything, they suggest as their complement E C T or E F I C I E N C Y. The result depending on the total constellation, even though most of the single items be the same.

My practical reason for mentioning this law is this, that it follows from it that, in working associations into your pupils’ minds, you must not rely on single cues, but multiply the cues as much as possible.  Couple the desired reaction with numerous constellations of antecedents,—­don’t always ask the question, for example, in the same way; don’t use the same kind of data in numerical problems; vary your illustrations, etc., as much as you can.  When we come to the subject of memory, we shall learn still more about this.

So much, then, for the general subject of association.  In leaving it for other topics (in which, however, we shall abundantly find it involved again), I cannot too strongly urge you to acquire a habit of thinking of your pupils in associative terms.  All governors of mankind, from doctors and jail-wardens to demagogues and statesmen, instinctively come so to conceive their charges.  If you do the same, thinking of them (however else you may think of them besides) as so many little systems of associating machinery, you will be astonished at the intimacy of insight into their operations and at the practicality of the results which you will gain.  We think of our acquaintances, for example, as characterized by certain ‘tendencies.’  These tendencies will in almost every instance prove to be tendencies to association.  Certain ideas in them are always followed by certain other ideas, these by certain feelings and impulses to approve or disapprove, assent or decline.  If the topic arouse one of those first ideas, the practical outcome can be pretty well foreseen.  ‘Types of character’ in short are largely types of association.