=Objects are associated, not ideas.= We shall avoid confusion if we consistently speak as if _association_, so far as the word stands for an _effect, were between_ THINGS THOUGHT OF--_as if it were_ THINGS, _not ideas, which are associated in the mind_. We shall talk of the association of _objects_, not of the association of _ideas_. And so far as association stands for a _cause_, it is between _processes in the brain_--it is these which, by being associated in certain ways, determine what successive objects shall be thought.
=The Elementary Principle.=--I shall now try to show that there is no other _elementary_ causal law of association than the law of neural habit. All the _materials_ of our thought are due to the way in which one elementary process of the cerebral hemispheres tends to excite whatever other elementary process it may have excited at any former time. The number of elementary processes at work, however, and the nature of those which at any time are fully effective in rousing the others, determine the character of the total brain-action, and, as a consequence of this, they determine the object thought of at the time. According as this resultant object is one thing or another, we call it a product of association by contiguity or of association by similarity, or contrast, or whatever other sorts we may have recognized as ultimate. Its _production_, however, is, in each one of these cases, to be explained by a merely quantitative variation in the elementary brain-processes momentarily at work under the law of habit.
My thesis, stated thus briefly, will soon become more clear; and at the same time certain disturbing factors, which coöperate with the law of neural habit, will come to view.
Let us then assume as the basis of all our subsequent reasoning this law: _When two elementary brain-processes have been active together or in immediate succession, one of them, on re-occurring, tends to propagate its excitement into the other._
But, as a matter of fact, every elementary process has unavoidably found itself at different times excited in conjunction with _many_ other processes. Which of these others it shall awaken now becomes a problem. Shall _b_ or _c_ be aroused next by the present _a_? To answer this, we must make a further postulate, based on the fact of _tension_ in nerve-tissue, and on the fact of summation of excitements, each incomplete or latent in itself, into an open resultant (see p. 128). The process _b_, rather than _c_, will awake, if in addition to the vibrating tract _a_ some other tract _d_ is in a state of sub-excitement, and formerly was excited with _b_ alone and not with _a_. In short, we may say: