and read the
narrative? As you read the description of a bit of natural scenery, does
it rise before you? As you study the description of a battle, can you
see the movements of the troops?

5. Have you ever planned a house as you think you would like it? Can you
see it from all sides? Can you see all the rooms in their various
finishings and furnishings?

6. What plans and ideals have you formed, and what ones are you at
present following? Can you describe the process by which your plans or
ideals change? Do you ever try to put yourself in the other person's
place?

7. Take some fanciful unreality which your imagination has constructed
and see whether you can select from it familiar elements from actual
experiences.

8. What use do you make of imagination in the common round of duties in
your daily life? What are you doing to improve your imagination?

CHAPTER X

ASSOCIATION

Whence came the thought that occupies you this moment, and what
determines the next that is to follow? Introspection reveals no more
interesting fact concerning our minds than that our thoughts move in a
connected and orderly array and not in a hit-and-miss fashion. Our
mental states do not throng the stream of consciousness like so many
pieces of wood following each other at random down a rushing current,
now this one ahead, now that. On the contrary, our thoughts come, one
after the other, as they are beckoned or _caused_. The thought now in
the focal point of your consciousness appeared because it sprouted out
of the one just preceding it; and the present thought, before it
departs, will determine its successor and lead it upon the scene. This
is to say that our thought stream possesses not only a continuity, but
also a _unity_; it has coherence and system. This coherence and system,
which operates in accordance with definite laws, is brought about by
what the psychologist calls _association_.

1. THE NATURE OF ASSOCIATION

We may define association, then, as the tendency among our thoughts to
form such a system of bonds with each other that the objects of
consciousness are vitally connected both (1) as they exist at any given
moment, and (2) as they occur in succession in the mental stream.

THE NEURAL BASIS OF ASSOCIATION.--The association of thoughts--ideas,
images, memory--or of a situation with its response, rests primarily on
a neural basis. Association is the result of habit working in neurone
groups. Its fundament