nt, you at once ascribe to the same point in space. From this
time on the same flowing together of sensations from the same place
will always mean for you that particular material thing, that
particular building. You have a sensation of yellow, and forthwith a
causal judgment tells you that something outside of your body produced
it. But it would be a pretty difficult matter for you to know just
what this something might be if there were not other simultaneous
sensations of a different kind coming from the same point in space. So
when you see a yellow color and at the same time experience a certain
familiar taste and a certain softness of touch, all arising from the
same source, then by a series of classifying judgments you put all
these different sensations together, assign them to the same object,
and give that object a name--for example, "butter."

[Sidenote: _The Archives of the Mind_]

This process of grouping and classification that we are describing
under the name of "classifying judgments" is no haphazard affair. It
is carried on in strict compliance with certain well-defined laws.

These laws prescribe and determine the workings of your mind just as
absolutely as the laws of physics control the operations of material
forces.

While each of these laws has its own special province and
jurisdiction, yet all have one element in common, and that is that
they all relate to those mental operations by which sense-perceptions,
causal judgments, and even classifying judgments, past, present and
imaginative, are grouped, bound together, arranged, catalogued and
pigeonholed in the archives of the mind.

These laws, taken collectively, are therefore called the Laws of
Association.

CHAPTER IV

THE FOUR PRIME LAWS OF ASSOCIATION

[Sidenote: _The Seeming Chaos of Mind_]

If there is any one thing in the world that seems utterly chaotic, it
is the way in which the mind wanders from one subject of thought to
another. It requires but a moment for it to flash from New York to
San Francisco, from San Francisco to Tokio, and around the globe. Yet
mental processes are as law-abiding as anything else in Nature.

[Sidenote: _Predicting Your Next Idea_]

So much is this true, that if we knew every detail of your past
experience from your first infantile sensation, and knew also just
what you are thinking of at the present moment, we could predict to
a mathematical certainty just what ideas would next appear on the