Now there seem no good grounds for supposing this additional wheelwork in the mind. The classification of '_this_' as M is itself an act of perception, and should, if all perception were inference, require a still earlier syllogism for its performance, and so backwards _in infinitum_. The only extrication from this coil would be to represent the process in altered guise, thus: 'This' is _like those_; _Those_ are A; Therefore 'this' is A. The major premise here involves no association by contiguity, no _naming_ of _those_ as M, but only a suggestion of unnamed similar images, a recall of analogous past sensations with which the characters that make up A were habitually conjoined. But here again, what grounds of fact are there for admitting this recall? We are quite unconscious of any such images of the past. And the conception of all the forms of association as resultants of the elementary fact of habit-worn paths in the brain makes such images entirely superfluous for explaining the phenomena in point. Since the brain-process of 'this,' the sign of A, has repeatedly been aroused in company with the process of the full object A, direct paths of irradiation from the one to the other must be already established. And although roundabout paths may also be possible, as from 'this' to 'those,' and then from 'those' to 'A' (paths which would lead to practically the same conclusion as the straighter ones), yet there is no ground whatever for assuming them to be traversed now, especially since appearances point the other way. In _explicit_ reasoning, such paths are doubtless traversed; in perception they are in all probability closed. So far, then, from perception being a species of reasoning properly so called, both it and reasoning are co-ordinate varieties of that deeper sort of process known psychologically as the association of ideas, and physiologically as the law of habit in the brain. _To call perception unconscious reasoning is thus either a useless metaphor, or a positively misleading confusion between two different things._ * * * * *