[Bain's footnote 26: This must be qualified by the fact that the same individual sensation may be found in many groupings, and therefore may not bring up any one aggregate or concrete object in particular. The colour, white, is seen in conjunction with many different shapes, magnitudes, and weight; consequently it does not suggest a specific shape or magnitude. In such a case, the recall may be very various according to circumstances; some individual may have a greater prominence than the rest, and be singled out on that ground; two or three may be brought to view; or a still greater number may be revived. This is an important limitation of the working of the associating principle. An individual thing is not restored, as a matter of course, unless the link of connexion points to it alone; as is often effected by a plurality of bonds. Thus a musical air is not suggested until as many notes are heard as to distinguish it from every other known air.--_B._] Thus, again, I have smelt a rose, and looked at, and handled a rose, synchronically; accordingly the name rose suggests to me all those ideas synchronically; and this combination of those simple ideas is called my idea of the rose. My idea of an animal is still more complex. The {80} word thrush, for example, not only suggests an idea of a particular colour and shape, and size, but of song, and flight, and nestling, and eggs, and callow young, and others. My idea of a man is the most complex of all; including not only colour, and shape, and voice, but the whole class of events in which I have observed him either the agent or the patient. 2. As the ideas of the sensations which occurred synchronically, rise synchronically, so the ideas of the sensations which occurred successively, rise successively. Of this important case of association, or of the successive order of our ideas, many remarkable instances might be adduced. Of these none seems better adapted to the learner than the repetition of any passage, or words; the Lord's Prayer, for example, committed to memory. In learning the passage, we repeat it; that is, we pronounce the words, in successive order, from the beginning to the end. The order of the sensations is successive. When we proceed to repeat the passage, the ideas of the words also rise in succession, the preceding always suggesting the succeeding, and no other. _Our_ suggests _Father_, _Father_ suggests _which_, _which_ suggests _art_; and so on, to the end. How remarkably this is the case, any one may convince himself, by trying to repeat backwards, even a passage with which he is as familiar as the Lord's Prayer. The case is the same with numbers. A man can go on with the numbers in the progressive order, one, two, three, &c. scarcely thinking of his act; and though it is possible for him to repeat them backward, because he is accustomed {81} to subtraction of numbers, he cannot do so without an effort.