ASSOCIATION BY SIMILARITY AND CONTRAST.--All are familiar with the fact that like tends to suggest like. One friend reminds us of another friend when he manifests similar traits of character, shows the same tricks of manner, or has the same peculiarities of speech or gesture. The telling of a ghost or burglar story in a company will at once suggest a similar story to every person of the group, and before we know it the conversation has settled down to ghosts or burglars. One boastful boy is enough to start the gang to recounting their real or imaginary exploits. Good and beautiful thoughts tend to call up other good and beautiful thoughts, while evil thoughts are likely to produce after their own kind; like produces like. Another form of relationship is, however, quite as common as similars in our thinking. In certain directions we naturally think in _opposites_. Black suggests white, good suggests bad, fat suggests lean, wealth suggests poverty, happiness suggests sorrow, and so on. The tendency of our thought thus to group in similars and opposites is clear when we go back to the fundamental law of association. The fact is that we more frequently assemble our thoughts in these ways than in haphazard relations. We habitually group similars together, or compare opposites in our thinking; hence these are the terms between which associative bonds are formed. PARTIAL, OR SELECTIVE, ASSOCIATION.--The past is never wholly reinstated in present consciousness. Many elements, because they had formed fewer associations, or because they find some obstacle to recall, are permanently dropped out and forgotten. In other words, association is always _selective_, favoring now this item of experience, now that, above the rest. It is well that this is so; for to be unable to escape from the great mass of minutiae and unimportant detail in one's past would be intolerable, and would so cumber the mind with useless rubbish as to destroy its usefulness. We have surely all had some experience with the type of persons whose associations are so complete and impartial that all their conversation teems with unessential and irrelevant details. They cannot recount the simplest incident in its essential points but, slaves to literalness, make themselves insufferable bores by entering upon every lane and by-path of circumstance that leads nowhere and matters not the least in their story. Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Shakespeare, and many other writers have seized upon such characters and made use of them for their comic effect. James, in illustrating this mental type, has quoted the following from Miss Austen's "Emma":