This pictorial description may be supplemented by an account of some associations in human life which are learned in the same way as are animal associations; associations, therefore, where the process of formation is possibly homologous with that in animals. When a man learns to swim, to play tennis or billiards, or to juggle, the process is something like what happens when the cat learns to pull the string to get out of the box, provided, of course, we remove, in the man’s case, all the accompanying mentality which is not directly concerned in learning the feat.[16] Like the latter, the former contains desire, sense-impression, impulse, act and possible representations. Like it, the former is learned gradually. Moreover, the associations concerned cannot be formed by imitation. One does not know how to dive just by seeing another man dive. You cannot form them from being put through them, though, of course, this helps indirectly, in a way that it does not with animals. One makes use of no feelings of a common element, no perceptions of similarity. The tennis player does not feel, “This ball coming at this angle and with this speed is similar in angle, though not in speed, to that other ball of an hour ago, therefore I will hit it in a similar way.” He simply feels an impulse from the sense-impression. Finally, the elements of the associations are not isolated. No tennis player’s stream of thought is filled with free-floating representations of any of the tens of thousands of sense-impressions or movements he has seen and made on the tennis court. Yet there is consciousness enough at the time, keen consciousness of the sense-impressions, impulses, feelings of one’s bodily acts. So with the animals. There is consciousness enough, but of this kind. Thus, the associations in human life, which compare with the simple connections learned by animals, are associations involving connections between novel, complex and often inconstant sense-impressions and impulses to acts similarly novel, complex and often inconstant. Man has the elements of most of his associations in isolated form, attended to separately, possessed as a permanent fund, recallable at will, and multifariously connected among themselves, but with these associations which we have mentioned, and with others like them, he deals as the animals deal with theirs. The process, in the man’s mind, leaving out extraneous mental stuff, may be homologous to the association-process in animals. Of course, by assiduous attention to the elements of these associations, a man may isolate them, may thus get these associations to the same plane as the rest. But they pass through the stage we have described, even then, and with most men, stay there. The abstraction, the naming, etc., generally come from observers of the game or action, and concern things as felt by them, not by the participant. CRITICISM OF PREVIOUS THEORIES