In 1) B learnt to bring a building stone on hearing the word “column!” called out. We could imagine what happened in such a case to be this: In B's mind the word called out brought up an image of a column, say; the training had, as we should say, established this association. B takes up that building stone which conforms to his image. ‒ ‒ But was this necessarily what happened? If the training could bring it about that the idea or image – – automatically – – arose in B's mind, why shouldn't it bring about B's actions without the intervention of an image?
20.
This would only come to a slight variation of the associative mechanism. Bear in mind that the image which is brought up by the word is not arrived at by a rational process (but if it is, this only pushes our argument further back), but that this case is strictly comparable with that of a mechanism in which a button is pressed and an indicator plate appears. In fact this sort of mechanism can be used instead of that of association.