_Habit, recency, vividness, and emotional congruity_ are, then, all reasons why one representation rather than another should be awakened by the interesting portion of a departing thought. We may say with truth that _in the majority of cases the coming representation will have been either habitual, recent, or vivid, and will be congruous_. If all these qualities unite in any one absent associate, we may predict almost infallibly that that associate of the going object will form an important ingredient in the object which comes next. In spite of the fact, however, that the succession of representations is thus redeemed from perfect indeterminism and limited to a few classes whose characteristic quality is fixed by the nature of our past experience, it must still be confessed that an immense number of terms in the linked chain of our representations fall outside of all assignable rule. To take the instance of the clock given on page 263. Why did the jeweller's shop suggest the shirt-studs rather than a chain which I had bought there more recently, which had cost more, and whose sentimental associations were much more interesting? Any reader's experience will easily furnish similar instances. So we must admit that to a certain extent, even in those forms of ordinary mixed association which lie nearest to impartial redintegration, _which_ associate of the interesting item shall emerge must be called largely a matter of accident--accident, that is, for our intelligence. No doubt it is determined by cerebral causes, but they are too subtile and shifting for our analysis.