dissimilations, which continually intervene as reproductive factors in our immediate sense-perceptions, make up the fundamental forms of the process, which determine all acts of memory. And these themselves can always be reduced to assimilation processes, which have been divided up into a succession, partly because of hindrances, and partly because of the temporal arrangement of the ideational processes themselves. CHAPTER IV APPERCEPTION There are cases of severe insanity in which the patients utter with great rapidity a number of words, joined together without sense and sometimes intermingled with absolutely meaningless sounds. This symptom is considered a component of the so-called "flight of ideas." A sane person can also produce this, if he, without any train of thought, simply repeats any words that may occur to him. For example, the following is such a series of words: "school house garden build stones ground hard soft long see harvest rain move pain." Compare with this a context like the following out of the seventh book of Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_: "Spring had come in all its glory. A spring thunder-storm, that had been threatening the whole day long, passed angrily over the hills. The rain-clouds swept over the land, the sun came out again in his majesty, and the glorious rainbow appeared against the grey background." Wherein do these two word-combinations differ from each other? We are perhaps inclined to answer that the first series is lacking in any connection between the separate elements. It seems almost like a series of words taken at haphazard out of a dictionary and placed aimlessly one after the other. And yet one soon notices that the separate words are not quite so unconnected, as at the first glance they seem to be. As a rule it is obviously some memory-association that combines the succeeding word with the preceding one, as "house" with "school," and "garden" with "house," and so on. Sometimes the association may join a word with one preceding it at a greater distance back, or it may join two different words to the same one, e.g. "stones" with "build" and "house," "ground" with "garden." Sometimes also it may not be the ideational content itself, but the mere rhyme, that brings about the combination, as with "rain" and "pain." In other cases we may not be able to find a definite association at all. And yet, considering the many-sided and darkly perceived ideas often caused by mere affective influences, which we have considered above, we cannot help taking for granted latent associations in such cases as well, and especially since these cases happen very seldom. A "free, unconnected chain of ideas," as is sometimes presupposed, we shall place at once in the same category with "chance" in the region of physical phenomena. Just as in the latter case, it simply means for us that the cause cannot be found in the case in question. From this point of view the first series of words is in some way or other psychologically