[Sidenote: _Predicting Your Next Idea_] So much is this true, that if we knew every detail of your past experience from your first infantile sensation, and knew also just what you are thinking of at the present moment, we could predict to a mathematical certainty just what ideas would next appear on the kaleidoscopic screen of your thoughts. This is due to laws that govern the association of ideas. These laws are, in substance, that the way in which judgments and ideas are classified and stored away, and the order in which they are brought forth into consciousness depends upon what other judgments and ideas they have been associated with most _habitually_, _recently_, _closely_ and _vividly_. There are, therefore, four Prime Laws of Association--the Law of Habit, the Law of Recency, the Law of Contiguity and the Law of Vividness. Every idea that can possibly arise in your thoughts has its vast array of associates, to each of which it is linked by some one element in common. Thus, you see or dream of a yellow flower, and the one property of yellowness links the idea of that flower with everything you ever before saw or dreamed of that was similarly hued. [Sidenote: _The Bonds of Intellect_] But the yellow-flower thought is not tied to all these countless associates by bonds of equal strength. And which associate shall come next to mind is determined by the four Prime Laws of Association. The Law of Habit requires that _frequency_ of association be the one test to determine what idea shall next come into consciousness, while the Laws of Recency, Contiguity and Vividness emphasize respectively recency of occurrence, closeness in point of space and intensity of impression. Which law and which element shall prevail is all a question of degree. The most important of these laws is the _Law of Habit_. In obedience to this law, _the next idea to enter the mind will be the one that has been most frequently associated with the interesting part of the subject you are now thinking of_. The sight of a pile of manuscript on your desk ready for the printer, the thought of a printer, the word "printer," spoken or printed, calls to mind the particular printer with whom you have been dealing for some years. The word "cocoa," the thought of a cup of cocoa, the mental picture of a cup of cocoa, may conjure with it not merely a steaming cup before the mind's eye and the flavor of the contents, but also a daintily clad figure in apron and cap bearing the brand of some well-known cocoa manufacturer. If a typist or pianist has learned one system of fingering, it is almost impossible to change, because each letter, each note on the keyboard is associated with the idea of movement in a particular finger. Constant use has so welded these associations together that when one enters the mind it draws its associate in its train.