onnexion of some sort between itself and the word or note next in
order, enables you without the smallest mental effort to utter that
word or strike that note, is too notorious to be questioned. But I do
very earnestly question whether the connexion that thus operates is an
association of ideas. How can it be, when, as frequently happens, you
have not the smallest idea of what it is you are saying or playing? Have
you not often, after reverently saying grace, like the decent
paterfamilias you probably are, occasioned a giggle round the table by
saying it again a minute or two afterwards, in utter unconsciousness
that you had said it just before? Or, if I may so far flatter myself as
to fancy my reader a fair daughter of the house instead of the staid
house father--has it never happened to you, Miss, while executing a
brilliant performance on the piano, to have been so entirely engrossed
by an animated flirtation carried on simultaneously, that, if at the
conclusion of the piece you had been asked what you had been playing,
you could not have replied whether it was _La ci darem la mano_ or _Non
mi voglio maritar_? And is it not evident that non-existent ideas cannot
have called real ideas into existence?

My own modest contribution towards explanation of these mysterious
phenomena is as follows. Apart from association of _ideas_, there is a
separate and independent association--to wit, association of
_volitions_. While committing to memory a form of words, or trying a new
piece of music, every separate movement of your tongue or of your
fingers is consequent on some separate volition. Each series of
movements is consequent on a series of volitions. By being repeatedly
made to follow each other in the same order, the several volitions
become connected with each other, so that whenever the mind desires to
marshal them in the aforesaid order, each one, as it presents itself,
brings with it the next in succession, until the whole series is
completed; while, as each volition has consequent upon it a
corresponding movement, a series of corresponding movements
simultaneously takes place. The mind meanwhile is quite unconscious of
the muscular movements that are going on. What it is conscious of are
the volitions without which no voluntary movements of the muscles could
have been made, and of which the mind must needs be conscious, because a
volition of which the mind was not conscious would be an involuntary
volition, a birth t