ice leaves its never-so-little
scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself
for every fresh dereliction by saying, "I won't count this time!" Well,
he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being
counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the
molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used
against him when the next temptation comes. Nothing we ever do is, in
strict scientific literalness, wiped out.

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