Experimental Study of Associative Processes 121 



behavior and Professor James' theory of the nature of and 

 presumable brain processes going with the abstractions and 

 conceptions of human consciousness, but it is justified chiefly 

 by its harmony with the view that conception, the faculty 

 of having general notions, has been naturally selected by 

 reason of its utility. The first thing is for an animal to learn 

 to react alike only to things which resemble each other in the 

 essential qualities. On an artificial, analytic basis, feelings 

 of abstract qualities might grow out of reacting alike to ob- 

 jects similar in such a respect that the reaction would be 

 useless or harmful. But in the actual struggle for existence, 

 starting with the mammalian mind as we have found it, 

 you will tend to get reactions to the beneficial similarities 

 by selection from among these so-called mistakes, before 

 you get any general faculty of noticing similarities. In 

 order that this faculty of indifferent reaction to different 

 things shall grow into the useful faculty of indifferent reac- 

 tion to different things which have all some quality that makes 

 the reaction a fit one, there must be a tremendous range of 

 associations. For a lot of the similarities which are non- 

 essential have to be stamped out, not by a power of feeling 

 likeness, but by their failure to lead to pleasure. With 

 such a wide range of associations we may get reactions on 

 the one hand where impulses have been connected with one 

 particular sense-impression because when connected with 

 all others they had failed to give pleasure, and on the other 

 hand, reactions where an impulse has been connected with 

 numerous different impressions possessing one common 

 quality, and disconnected with all impressions, otherwise 

 like these, which fail to have that one quality. 



Combined with this multiplication of associations, there is, 

 I think, an equally important factor, the loosening of the 

 elements of an association from one another and from it as a 



