No great
attention to what passes in the mind is needful to prove that our trains
of thought are neither to be arrested, nor even permanently controlled,
by our desires or emotions. Nevertheless they are largely influenced by
them. In the presence of a strong desire, or emotion, the stream of
thought no longer flows on in a straight course, but seems, as it were,
to eddy round the idea of that which is the object of the emotion. Every
one who has "eaten his bread in sorrow" knows how strangely the current
of ideas whirls about the conception of the object of regret or remorse
as a centre; every now and then, indeed, breaking away into the new
tracks suggested by passing associations, but still returning to the
central thought. Few can have been so happy as to have escaped the
social bore, whose pet notion is certain to crop up whatever topic is
started; while the fixed idea of the monomaniac is but the extreme form
of the same phenomenon.
And as, on the one hand, it is so hard to drive away the thought we
would fain be rid of; so, upon the other, the pleasant imaginations
which we would so gladly retain are, sooner or later, jostled away by
the crowd of claimants for birth into the world of consciousness; which
hover as a sort of psychical possibilities, or inverse ghosts, the
bodily presentments of spiritual phenomena to be, in the limbo of the
brain. In that form of desire which is called "attention," the train of
thought, held fast, for a time, in the desired direction, seems ever
striving to get on to another line--and the junctions and sidings are so
multitudinous!
The constituents of trains of ideas may be grouped in various ways.
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