tion of an object, but for the memory of some environing circumstance, or of some shade of feeling, which does not recur in the present experience. The verses which follow those already quoted from the Gipsies illustrate this: —
Only their fire seems bolder, yielding light
Now deep and red, the coloring of the night.
*******
Twelve hours, twelve bounteous hours are gone, while I
Have been a traveller under open sky,
*******
Yet as I left, I find them here.
The cerebral correlates of these intellectual processes are readily hypothesized. The general brain-state corresponding with the fact of association is stimulation of a brain-tract already stimulated and radiation of the activity, through paths already worn, to other brain-tracts which have been stimulated in connection with the first. Münsterberg[1] insists that the stimulation of the tracts must originally have been at least partially simultaneous, and in the perception of an object through several senses, the stimulation of visual, auditory, and tactual centres probably is simultaneous; but it is at least conceivable that, in the case of desistent or external association (of "contiguity"), the tract first stimulated may return to its normal condition before the neural activity of the others begin. If this be not true, then there is no fixed cerebral distinction between the two sorts of association, for in the case of persistent association (of “similarity”) the whole or part of the tract first stimulated must continue in vibration with the later one.
Unless Münsterberg be correct, there is therefore a further cerebral difference corresponding with the difference between the ordinary successive association and simultaneous association (or assimilation). We may assume that, in the latter case, the tracts re-stimulated were originally stimulated together; that, in the former, there were successively stimulated.
- ↑ Zeitschrift der Physiologie u. Psychologie d. Sinnesorganen (1891), Band II., p. 99.
