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and How far is the flow established and maintained by independent connections?

The doctrine of association has been the occasion of ascribing a dependence and passivity to intellectual connections which we deem wholly false. The association of ideas has been accepted as an ultimate fact, and itself without explanation, been proffered as an explanation of every other fact. This solution has proceeded under physical analogies, especially those of habit in the body. A form of activity, often returning to the muscles, so interlocks the nerves and muscles, so passes over their connection from the voluntary to the automatic region, that the mere fact of repetition becomes a reason for many movements not directly intended. Under the suggestion of this fact, ideas are spoken of as associated, and this association seems to be often thought of as involving some direct, almost mechanical connection of one idea with another; as if the first evoked and drew on the second by an immediate force. Thus we have such expressions as the " cohesiveness of ideas," " the principle of cohesiveness," " the property of plastic adhesiveness," " the tenacity of association." Those who thus use the law of association, refer the order of ideas in the mind to it, and give the mind itself but little control over them, beyond that of hastening or checking their movement.

It is the living power of the mind, rather than an intrinsic coherence of ideas that combines them into thought, and locates them in revery. The memory proceeds along the connections of place, time, resemblance and causation, because these are the forms under which objects are principally presented to it; and the groups of memory principally determine the connections and dependence of conceptions, when they return to the mind. One object tends to restore in memory, more or less distinctly, the entire group