association, association
by similarity. This was a feat for the wit and the poet, to jump from
China to Peru, by virtue of some spark of likeness that might flash out
between them.

[Sidenote: It describes coincidences.]

Much natural history has been written and studied with the idea of
finding curious facts. The demand has not been for constant laws or
intelligibility, but for any circumstance that could arrest attention or
divert the fancy. In this spirit, doubtless, instances of association
were gathered and classified. It was the young ladies' botany of mind.
Under association could be gathered a thousand interesting anecdotes, a
thousand choice patterns of thought. Talk of the wars, says Hobbes, once
led a man to ask what was the value of a Roman penny. But why only once?
The wars must have been often mentioned when the delivering up of King
Charles did not enter any mind; and when it did, this would not have led
any one to think of Judas and the thirty pence, unless he had been a
good royalist and a good Christian--and then only by a curious accident.
It was not these ideas, then, in their natural capacity that suggested
one another; but some medium in which they worked, once in the world,
opened those particular avenues between them. Nevertheless, no one cared
to observe that each fact had had many others, never recalled,
associated with it as closely as those which were remembered. Nor was
the matter taken so seriously that one needed to ask how, among all
similar things, similarity could decide which should be chosen; nor how
among a thousand contiguous facts one rather than another should be
recalled for contiguity's sake.

[Sidenote: Understanding is based on instinct and expressed in
dialectic.]

The best instance, perhaps, of regular association might be found in
language and its meaning; for understanding implies that each word
habitually calls up its former associates. Yet in what, psychologically
considered, does understanding a word consist? What concomitants does
the word "horse" involve in actual sentience? Hardly a clear image such
as a man might paint; for the name is not confined to recalling one view
of one animal obtained at one moment. Perhaps all that recurs is a vague
sense of the environment, in nature and in discourse, in which that
object lies. The word "kite" would immediately make a different region
warm in the world through which the mind was groping. One would turn in
idea to the