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der of ideas, your mental tendency will be to take the same route, and get to the same goal again and again. Indeed, beginning with the weight of $1,000,000, "image of law" will turn up in your mind without your consciousness of any intermediate station on the way, after some iteration and reiteration of the original chain. Again, so as to fasten the process in the reader's mind even more firmly, suppose that it were desired to fix the date of the battle of Hastings (A. D. 1066) in the memory; 1066 may be represented by the words "the wise judge" (th--1, s--0, j--6, dg--6; the others are non-significants); a chain might be made thus: Battle of Hastings--arbitrament of war. Arbitrament of war--arbitration. Arbitration--judgment. Judgment--the wise judge. Make mental pictures, connect ideas, repeat words and sounds, go about it any way you please, so that you will form a mental habit of connecting the "battle of Hastings" with the idea of "arbitrament of war," and so on for the other links in the chain, and the work is done. Loisette makes the beginning of his system unnecessarily difficult, to say nothing of his illogical arrangement in the grammar of the art of memory, which he makes the first of his lessons. He analyzes suggestion into-- 1. Inclusion. 2. Exclusion. 3. Concurrence. All of which looks very scientific and orderly, but is really misleading and badly named. The truth is that one idea will suggest another: 1. By likeness or opposition of meaning, as "house" suggests "room" or "door," etc.; or, "white" suggests "black"; "cruel," "kind," etc. 2. By likeness of sound, as "harrow" and "barrow"; "Henry" and "Hennepin." 3. By mental juxtaposition, a peculiarity different in each person, and depending upon each one's own experiences. Thus, "St. Charles" suggests "railway bridge" to me, because I was vividly impressed by the breaking of the Wabash bridge at that point. "Stable" and "broken leg" come near each other in my experience, as do "cow" and "shot-gun" and "licking." Out of these three sorts of suggestion it is possible to get from anyone fact to another in a chain certain and safe, along which the mind may be depended upon afterwards always to follow. The chain is, of course, by no means all. Its making and its binding must be accompanied by a vivid, methodically directed attention, which turns all the mental light gettable in a focus upon the subject passing across the
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