One word more about the assumed regularity in the succession of ideas. That when you are repeating a familiar form of words or playing a familiar piece of music, every word uttered or note struck, by reason of connexion of some sort between itself and the word or note next in order, enables you without the smallest mental effort to utter that word or strike that note, is too notorious to be questioned. But I do very earnestly question whether the connexion that thus operates is an association of ideas. How can it be, when, as frequently happens, you have not the smallest idea of what it is you are saying or playing? Have you not often, after reverently saying grace, like the decent paterfamilias you probably are, occasioned a giggle round the table by saying it again a minute or two afterwards, in utter unconsciousness that you had said it just before? Or, if I may so far flatter myself as to fancy my reader a fair daughter of the house instead of the staid house father--has it never happened to you, Miss, while executing a brilliant performance on the piano, to have been so entirely engrossed by an animated flirtation carried on simultaneously, that, if at the conclusion of the piece you had been asked what you had been playing, you could not have replied whether it was _La ci darem la mano_ or _Non mi voglio maritar_? And is it not evident that non-existent ideas cannot have called real ideas into existence? My own modest contribution towards explanation of these mysterious phenomena is as follows. Apart from association of _ideas_, there is a separate and independent association--to wit, association of _volitions_. While committing to memory a form of words, or trying a new piece of music, every separate movement of your tongue or of your fingers is consequent on some separate volition. Each series of movements is consequent on a series of volitions. By being repeatedly made to follow each other in the same order, the several volitions become connected with each other, so that whenever the mind desires to marshal them in the aforesaid order, each one, as it presents itself, brings with it the next in succession, until the whole series is completed; while, as each volition has consequent upon it a corresponding movement, a series of corresponding movements simultaneously takes place. The mind meanwhile is quite unconscious of the muscular movements that are going on. What it is conscious of are the volitions without which no voluntary movements of the muscles could have been made, and of which the mind must needs be conscious, because a volition of which the mind was not conscious would be an involuntary volition, a birth too monstrous for even metaphysics to be equal to. But although necessarily conscious of these volitions, the mind is only momentarily conscious. It pays them barely an instant's attention, and therefore instantaneously forgets them, retaining no more trace of them than if they had never been.