nd something masculine
in the color red and something feminine in the color pale blue, or
where, of three human beings' characters, one will remind us of a cat,
another of a dog, the third perhaps of a cow.

* * * * *

Psychologists have of course gone very deeply into the question of what
the causes of association may be; and some of them have tried to show
that contiguity and similarity are not two radically diverse laws, but
that either presupposes the presence of the other. I myself am disposed
to think that the phenomena of association depend on our cerebral
constitution, and are not immediate consequences of our being rational
beings. In other words, when we shall have become disembodied spirits,
it may be that our trains of consciousness will follow different laws.
These questions are discussed in the books on psychology, and I hope
that some of you will be interested in following them there. But I will,
on the present occasion, ignore them entirely; for, as teachers, it is
the _fact_ of association that practically concerns you, let its grounds
be spiritual or cerebral, or what they may, and let its laws be
reducible, or non-reducible, to one. Your pupils, whatever else they
are, are at any rate little pieces of associating machinery. Their
education consists in the organizing within them of determinate
tendencies to associate one thing with another,--impressions with
consequences, these with reactions, those with results, and so on
indefinitely. The more copious the associative systems, the completer
the individual's adaptations to the world.

The teacher can formulate his function to himself therefore in terms of
'association' as well as in terms of 'native and acquired reaction.' It
is mainly that of _building up useful systems of association_ in the
pupil's mind. This description sounds wider than the one I began by
giving. But, when one thinks that our trains of association, whatever
they may be, normally issue in acquired reactions or behavior, one sees
that in a general way the same mass of facts is covered by both
formulas.

It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have
once grasped the principles of association. The great problem which
association undertakes to solve is, _Why does just this particular field
of consciousness, constituted in this particular way, now appear before
my mind?_ It may be a field of objects imagined; it may be of obj