Success Quote by Hermann Ebbinghaus

Ebbinghaus is describing the mind as less a gallery of isolated thoughts than a machine for reruns. Line up two ideas close together in time, repeat that pairing often enough, and you don’t just remember them; you build a one-way street between them. The phrasing is almost mechanical - “mutually reproduce,” “direction,” “certainty proportional” - and that’s the tell. He’s not writing about inspiration or character, but about a predictable system whose outputs can be measured, nudged, and, crucially, exploited.

The specific intent is methodological: pin association to time and frequency so it can be studied like any other regularity. This is late-19th-century psychology trying to prove it belongs in the lab, not the salon. Ebbinghaus famously tested memory on himself with nonsense syllables, stripping away meaning to see the bare scaffolding of recall. In that context, “original succession” isn’t poetic; it’s experimental design. Present A then B, and A becomes a cue for B more reliably than the reverse. That asymmetry anticipates what we now call priming and cue-dependent retrieval.

The subtext is slightly unnerving: if thought follows grooves, then “natural” opinions can be engineered by mere sequencing. It’s the skeleton key for habit formation, education, propaganda, and advertising - anywhere repetition and order can make an idea feel inevitable. Ebbinghaus isn’t moralizing about that power, but his cool certainty is its own provocation: what we experience as free-flowing thinking may just be yesterday’s order, replayed on command.