and fanciless beings who spare you no detail, however petty, of the facts they are recounting, and upon the thread of whose narrative all the irrelevant items cluster as pertinaciously as the essential ones, the slaves of literal fact, the stumblers over the smallest abrupt step in thought, are figures known to all of us. Comic literature has made her profit out of them. Juliet’s nurse is a classical example. George Eliot’s village characters and some of Dickens’s minor personages supply excellent instances.
Perhaps as successful a rendering as any of this mental type is the character of Miss Bates in Miss Austen’s "Emma." Hear how she redintegrates: "‘But where could you hear it?’ cried Miss Bates. ‘Where could you possibly hear it, Mr. Knightley? For it is not five minutes since I received Mrs. Cole’s note—no, it can not be more than five—or at least ten—for I had got my bonnet and spencer on, just ready to come out—I was only gone down to speak to Patty again about the pork—Jane was standing in the passage—were not you, Jane?—for my mother was so afraid that we had not any salting-pan large enough. So I said I would go down and see, and Jane said: "Shall I go down instead? for I think you have a little cold, and Patty has been washing the kitchen." "Oh, my dear," said I—well, and just then came the note. A Miss Hawkins—that’s all I know—a Miss Hawkins, of Bath. But, Mr. Knightley, how could you possibly have heard it? for the very moment Mr. Cole told Mrs. Cole of it, she sat down and wrote to me. A Miss Hawkins—’"
But in every one of us there are moments when this complete reproduction of all the items of a past experience occurs. What are those moments? They are moments of emotional recall of the past as something which once was, but is gone for ever—moments, the interest of which consists in the feeling that our self was once other than it now is. When this is the case, any detail, however minute, which will make the past picture more complete, will also have its effect in swelling that total contrast between now and then which forms the central interest of our contemplation.
This case helps us to understand why it is that the ordinary spontaneous flow of our ideas does not follow the law of "complete" Association by Contiguity. In no revival of a past experience are all the items of our thought equally and impartially operative in determining what the next thought shall be. Always some ingredient is prepotent over the rest. Its special suggestions or associations in this case will often be different from those which it has in common with the whole group of items; and its tendency to awaken these outlying associates will deflect the path of our reverie. Just as in the original sensible experience our attention focalized itself upon a few of the impressions of the scene before us, so here in the reproduced representation of those impressions the same partiality is shown, and some items emphasized above the rest. What these items shall be is, in most cases of sponta-
