THEORIES OF LEARNING: Page 44

Thinking, he said, is made up partly of perception and partly of idea formation. It is an intensely personal thing, highly influenced by emotion. It was James who first offered the 'stream of consciousness hypothesis.' He said, "Objects once experienced together tend to become associated in the imagination, so that when one of them is thought of, the others are likely to be thought of also, in the same order or sequence as before. The laws of motor habit in the lower center of the nervous system are disputed by no one. A series of movements repeated in a certain order tend to unroll themselves with particular ease in that order for ever afterward. Number one awakens number two, which awakens number three, and so on, until the last is produced. A habit of this kind, once become inveterate, may go on automatically. And so it is with the objects with which our thinking is concerned." Aristotle also described the nature of associative learning and explained the phenomenon of recall in terms of its laws. All psychologists since Aristotle have observed the rule of association by contiguity in time. Popular proverbs also bear out the observations: a burnt child dreads the fire; a person once bitten is twice shy; etc. Berkeley referred to "an habitual and customary connection" between ideas, one being the occasion for the next. Hume wrote of a "gentle force" by which one idea "naturally introduces another" if these ideas have previously occurred together. James Mill (1829) concurs with these theories: "Our ideas spring up, or exist, in the order in which the sensations existed, of which they are copies. That is the