percritical about
distinctions; we know that the bulk of the respective provinces of
nature and nurture are totally different, although the frontier
between them may be uncertain, and we are perfectly justified in
attempting to appraise their relative importance.

I shall begin with describing some of the principal influences that
may safely be ascribed to education or other circumstances, all of
which I include under the comprehensive term of Nurture.

ASSOCIATIONS.

The furniture of a man's mind chiefly consists of his recollections
and the bonds that unite them. As all this is the fruit of experience,
it must differ greatly in different minds according to their
individual experiences. I have endeavoured to take stock of my own
mental furniture in the way described in the next chapter, in which
it will be seen how large a part consists of childish recollections,
testifying to the permanent effect of many of the results of early
education. The same fact has been strongly brought out by the
replies from correspondents whom I had questioned on their mental
imagery. It was frequently stated that the mental image invariably
evoked by certain words was some event of childish experience or
fancy. Thus one correspondent, of no mean literary and philosophical
power, recollects the left hand by a mental reference to the
rocking-horse which always stood by the side of the nursery wall
with its head in the same direction, and had to be mounted from the
side next the wall. Another, a politician, historian, and scholar,
refers all his dates to the mental image of a nursery diagram of the
history of the world, which has since developed huge bosses to
support his later acquired information.

Our abstract ideas being mostly drawn from external experiences,
their character also must depend upon the events of our individual
histories. For example, the spoken words house and home must awaken
ideas derived from the houses and the homes with which the hearer is,
in one way or other, acquainted, and these could not be the same to
persons of various social positions and places of residence. The
character of our abstract ideas, therefore, depends, to a
considerable degree, on our nurture.

I doubt, however, whether "abstract idea" is a correct phrase in
many of the cases in which it is used, and whether "cumulative idea"
would not be more appropriate. The ideal faces obtained by the
method of composite portraiture appear to have