that a particular structure acts in a great many
different ways. Thus, it may be stimulated by unlike modes of stimuli,
or it may enter into very various connections with other structures.
What will follow from this? One consequence would appear to be that
there will be developed an organic connection between the two
structures, of such a kind that whenever one is excited the other will
be disposed to act somehow and anyhow, even when there is nothing in the
present mode of activity of the first structure to determine the second
to act in some one definite way, in other words, when this mode of
activity is, roughly speaking, novel.

Let me illustrate this effect in one of the simplest cases, that of the
visual organ. If, when walking out on a dark night, a few points in my
retina are suddenly stimulated by rays of light, and I recognize some
luminous object in a corresponding direction, I am prepared to see
something above and below, to the right and to the left of this object.
Why is this? There may from the first have been a kind of innate
understanding among contiguous optic fibres, predisposing them to such
concerted action. But however this be, this disposition would seem to
have been largely promoted by the fact that, throughout my experience,
the stimulation of any retinal point has been connected with that of
adjoining points, either simultaneously by some second object, or
successively by the same object as the eye moves over it, or as the
object itself moves across the field of vision.

When, therefore, in sleep any part of the optic centres is excited in a
particular way, and the images thus arising have their corresponding
loci in space assigned to them, there will be a disposition to refer any
other visual images which happen at the moment to arise in consciousness
to adjacent parts of space. The character of these other images will be
determined by other special conditions of the moment; their locality or
position in space will be determined by this organic connection. We may,
perhaps, call these tendencies to concerted action of some kind general
associative dispositions.

Just as there are such dispositions to united action among various parts
of one organ of sense, so there may be among different organs, which are
either connected originally in the infant organism, or have
communications opened up by frequent coexcitation of the two. Such links
there certainly are between the organs of taste and smel