s so welded these associations together that
when one enters the mind it draws its associate in its train.

Test the truth of these principles for yourself. Try them out and see
whether the elements of habit, contiguity, recency and intensity do
not determine all questions of association.

[Sidenote: _Brands and Tags_]

If you wanted to buy a house, what local subdivision would come first
to your mind, and why? If you were about to purchase a new tire for
your automobile or a few pairs of stockings, what brand would you buy,
and why? When you think of a camera or a cake of soap, what particular
make comes first to your mind? When you think of a home, what is the
mental picture that rises before you, and why?

Whatever the article, whether it be one of food or luxury or
investment, or even of sentiment, you will find that it is tagged with
a definite associate--a name, a brand, or a personality characterized
by frequency, recency, closeness or vividness of presentation to your
consciousness.

The grouping together of sensations into integral ideas is one step
in the complicated mental processes by which useful knowledge is
acquired. But the associative processes go much beyond this.

[Sidenote: _How Experience is Systematized_]

We also compare the different objects of present and past experience.
We carefully and thoroughly catalogue them into groups, divisions and
subdivisions for convenient and ready reference. This we do by the
processes of memory, of association and of discrimination, previously
referred to.

[Sidenote: _How Language Is Simplified_]

Through these processes our knowledge of the world, derived from the
whole vast field of experience, is unified and systematized. Through
these processes is order realized from chaos. Through these processes
it comes about that not only individual thought, but the communication
of thought from one person to another, is vastly simplified. Language
is enabled to deal with ideas instead of with isolated sense-perceptions.
The single word "horse" suffices to convey a thought that could not be
adequately set forth in a page-long enumeration of disconnected
sense-perceptions.

The associative process covers a wide range. It includes, for example,
not only the simple definition of an aggregate of sense-perceptions,
as "horse" or "cow"; it includes as well the inferential process of
abstract reasoning.

[Sidenote: _Processes of Reasoning and Reflection_]

The on