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literal term in its twentieth meaning, attached in tins signification directly to its object; though there lie between the first use and the present application nineteen images, each of which has been carried in the imagination, imparting to the word a figurative force for a greater or less length of time. What is to hinder the mind's going directly? Nothing: association itself prepares the way for it.

The explications offered by unconscious mental acts involve facts far more obscure than those explained. This movement under the surface of consciousness, is in itself a most perplexing riddle, a strange something we know not what. Nor, if it is granted, do we at all understand how it can or does change its nature, and suddenly issue in a movement within consciousness. The supplied links in this theory are of an unintelligible nature, and do their work in an unintelligible way. The whole result is more perplexing and obscure than if we accept the naked phenomena, and suppose the mind to pass from idea to idea, now by a more direct, now by a more circuitous route, able to do the first, because it has done the second. The facts presented in consciousness are more manageable by themselves than when surrounded by suppositions, which involve phenomena unknown and unknowable. The dip of the thread of connections below consciousness is a loss of it for all practical and explanatory purposes in chaos and night. If it re-appears in the realm of knowledge, it comes like a ghost from Hades, in a mysterious method and an inexplicable guise.

The answer, then, to this proof is double. (1) New associations are constantly obliterating and overriding old associations. (2) And the intermediate steps of an association often repeated drop from the mind. The mind is able to unite directly the first and last terms, when these are the only significant ones. Thus the Roman characters for four,