At the same time, such experiments help us; they show, for instance, that the doctrine of association—quite apart from its logical leanings, or perhaps just by reason of them—regarded the course of ideas in too ‘intellectual’ a way; _the sense-feelings, and other feeling-blends that we shall mention later, play a larger part in our thinking than the associationists dreamed of_. They show, too, that _the ‘successive association’ is not the commonest, but rather the least common, form of mental connection_. Listen to a quotation from Hobbes! “In a discourse of our present civil war,” he writes, “what could seem more impertinent [less to the point] than to ask, as one did, what was the value of the Roman penny? Yet the coherence to me was manifest enough. For the thought of the war introduced the thought of delivering up the king to his enemies; the thought of that brought in the thought of the delivering up of Christ; and that again the thought of the thirty pence, which was the price of that treason. And thence easily followed that malicious question: and all this in a moment of time, for thought is quick.” Hobbes has worked out the logical coherence, the coherence of meaning; but he is very far from a psychology of the situation. What actually took place in the mind of the questioner we shall never know; we may be very sure, however, that his mental processes did not follow one another in logical order, as Hobbes imagines. There was a convergence of associative tendencies, which expressed itself in the question; there need not have been any succession of ideas at all. § 36. =The Law of Mental Connection.=—We have spoken at some length of the establishment of associative tendencies in the brain, of their decay with time, and of their mutual interference. Can we sum up our knowledge of them in _a single general statement_? And can we then translate this general statement into =psychological= language, and so reach a _formula of mental connection_ that may stand in place of the logical laws of association? Let us try. We must proceed very carefully, even if our care drives us into clumsiness of expression. We cannot, for instance, leave out the fact that the meaningless syllables are given in the state of _attention_. It appears, indeed, that attention is necessary to association; we may doubt if any amount of repetition—to take that example—would set up an associative tendency, were it not for attention. Repetition, we remember, is one of the determinants of attention (p. 94); so that the repeated experience is likely to become vivid in the very nature of the case; but if it does not, if for any reason our attention is diverted or we fail to notice the stimulus, repetition has no associative power. How many of us would like to recall the carpet or wall-paper of the room we slept in as children! Thousands of times we saw the colours and the patterns; but our adult memory is an absolute blank; those repeated stimuli never ‘impressed’ us.