The drift which I have so carefully described and you, I hope, have inspected in your own mind, is not a bad thing nor a disorderly one. It is the relaxed condition of the mind, and we can use it for resting when we are mentally tired. In the course of prolonged study involving mental effort we may stop awhile to rest and recuperate by simply leaning back, closing the eyes, relaxing the body — especially the neck — and quietly watching the mental drift.

[I want to warn some readers against the habit of mental relaxation into ideas of sensuous experience, which is not uncommon. Some people do this to induce sleep. Looking at the mental drift, if continued, will induce sleep also, and it is a much better way. It induces sleep with full mental relaxation and does not conduce to dreams.] It is not healthy to be thinking all the time. Thinking is intended for acquiring knowledge or applying knowledge. It is not essential living.

That the drift is not something disorderly and without cause and system I will now show, by describing what I have called the Four Roads of Thought. [For the full exposition of the Four Roads of Thought, including the sub-divisions of them, making nine in all, see Mind and Memory Training by Ernest Wood, published by Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons, Ltd London England. However, that full exposition is not required for the practice of Concentration though necessary in memory training.]These are sometimes called the associations of ideas, but, strictly speaking, that term would refer to the effects of Contiguity only, i.e., to remembered things, their parts and qualities and familiar contacts, and remembered thoughts about them.

It will be a case of Contiguity if, when I go out in my car this evening, I have a collision with another car at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street. We will assume that this is enough to give me a nervous shock or even some injury, but not enough to put me out of action. I have been in two such accidents — one in Wales and one in India — in which the cars were terribly damaged but I came out almost unhurt. These two accidents remain vividly in memory, so that any mention of the places Holywell and Devala, where they occurred, will instantaneously bring them, with many attendant details, into my mental view.

At present, mention of the intersection of Hollywood and Vine does not bring up thoughts of a sickening blow and crumpled cars, but rather pictures of a large Bank building and streams of pedestrians crossing at the signal of a green light and a semaphore marked “go”. But if I have a similar accident at that place I shall thenceforth have a strong association of that place and the event, so that my pedestrians and my Bank will sink to the status of second and third quality associations in connection with the thought of that intersection of streets.

The strength of associations of ideas is due to (I) vivid or emphatic experience of two things in conjunction, as related above, or (2) frequent repetition in conjunction of two things which are not vivid or emphatic in experience. An example of the latter cause of association is the learning that in French “livre” means “book”, which the student usually achieves by repeating “livre” and “book” close together a number of times.

This forming of associations goes on not only in connection with our own experience, but also with what we have read or been told.

Before closing this piece of description of Contiguity, I must mention that we have juxtapositions in time as well as in space, in the form of familiar sequences. Thus a darkly lowering cloud leads to the expectation of rain, or in American towns, a peculiar tinkling nursery tune sounding in the street presages the arrival of an ice-cream van. In this manner also the letter A recalls B rather than, say, Q or X. Such are the time Contiguities, sometimes amounting to the invariable sequence dubbed cause and effect in the material sciences.

The other Three Roads of Thought are: (2) Class Relationship, or logical inclusion; (3) Whole and Part, or concrete inclusion; and (4) Object and Quality or functional inclusion.

Suppose I am instructing a group. Several people are sitting before me and I utter the word “cow”. One person may think of a brown cow, another of a black one; myself, I am thinking of a five-legged cow which an old friend of mine saw in India and wrote about. Someone may jump from the class-concept “cow” to the bigger class-concept “animal”. Thus we see together an object and its class, and the mind passes easily along that road from one to the other. If I suddenly say “pencil” and ask you for the first word that comes up you may give me the Contiguity “hand” or “paper”, or, following this second Road of Thought, you may call out “typewriter”, having gone through its class to another member of the same class of things. If I pronounce “chair”, you might say “my mother’s rocking chair”, or possibly “furniture”, or, if your Road of the moment is Contiguity, you might call out “cushion”, thinking of an experience of a cushion on a chair.

There are still two other Roads of Thought which you may follow in these cases. One is that of Analysis or concrete inclusion. This gives the relation between whole and part of an object. It may lead from “cow” to “horns”, horns being part of a cow, or from “chair” to “back” or “legs” ..

Fourthly, we have the Road of Quality or functional inclusion, from which may arise innumerable adjectives, such as “old” or “new”, “soft” or “hard”, “figured” or “plain”, “big” or “little”, “round” or “square”, “blue” or “green”, “quick” or “slow”. For example, “tortoise” may give rise to “slowness”, “elephant” may give rise to “strength”. To a Hindu mind, which often tends to run on abstract more than concrete lines, “cow” generally calls up “beneficence” or “bounty” for to most of them it has stood since childhood as the chief symbol of that quality. For convenience I give a chart showing examples of the four Roads of Thought.

contiguity, four roads, memory training, mental effort, mental relaxation, remembered things, sensuous experience