is thus no real or ultimate
explanation; for it is itself explained as a result of the association
of ideas.

Nothing is easier than to show you just what I mean by this. Suppose I
am silent for a moment, and then say in commanding accents: "Remember!
Recollect!" Does your faculty of memory obey the order, and reproduce
any definite image from your past? Certainly not. It stands staring into
vacancy, and asking, "What kind of a thing do you wish me to remember?"
It needs in short, a _cue_. But, if I say, remember the date of your
birth, or remember what you had for breakfast, or remember the
succession of notes in the musical scale; then your faculty of memory
immediately produces the required result: the _'cue'_ determines its
vast set of potentialities toward a particular point. And if you now
look to see how this happens, you immediately perceive that the cue is
something _contiguously associated_ with the thing recalled. The words,
'date of my birth,' have an ingrained association with a particular
number, month, and year; the words, 'breakfast this morning,' cut off
all other lines of recall except those which lead to coffee and bacon
and eggs; the words, 'musical scale,' are inveterate mental neighbors of
do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, etc. The laws of association govern, in fact,
all the trains of our thinking which are not interrupted by sensations
breaking on us from without. Whatever appears in the mind must be
_introduced_; and, when introduced, it is as the associate of something
already there. This is as true of what you are recollecting as it is of
everything else you think of.

Reflection will show you that there are peculiarities in your memory
which would be quite whimsical and unaccountable if we were forced to
regard them as the product of a purely spiritual faculty. Were memory
such a faculty, granted to us solely for its practical use, we ought to
remember easiest whatever we most _needed_ to remember; and frequency of
repetition, recency, and the like, would play no part in the matter.
That we should best remember frequent things and recent things, and
forget things that are ancient or were experienced only once, could only
be regarded as an incomprehensible anomaly on such a view. But if we
remember because of our associations, and if these are (as the
physiological psychologists believe) due to our organized brain-paths,
we easily see how the law of recency and repetition should prevail.
Paths frequ