Experimental Study of Associative Processes 125 



with these associations which we have mentioned, and with 

 others like them, he deals as the animals deal with theirs. 

 The process, in the man's mind, leaving out extraneous men- 

 tal stuff, may be homologous to the association-process in 

 animals. Of course, by assiduous attention to the elements 

 of these associations, a man may isolate them, may thus get 

 these associations to the same plane as the rest. But they 

 pass through the stage we have described, even then, and 

 with most men, stay there. The abstraction, the naming, 

 etc., generally come from observers of the game or action, 

 and concern things as felt by them, not by the participant. 



CRITICISM OF PREVIOUS THEORIES 



We may now look for a moment at what previous writers 

 have said about the nature of association in animals. The 

 complaint was made early in this book that all the state- 

 ments had been exceedingly vague and of no value, except as 

 retorts to the f reason ' school. In the course of the discus- 

 sion I have tried to extricate from this vagueness definite 

 statements about imitation, association of ideas, association 

 by ideas. There is one more theory, more or less hidden in 

 the vagueness, the theory that association in animals is the 

 same as association in man, that the animal mind differs 

 from the human mind only by the absence of reason and 

 what it implies. Presumably, silence about what associa- 

 tion is, means that it is the association which human psy- 

 chology discusses. When the silence is broken, we get such 

 utterances of this theory as the following : - 



" I think we may say then that the higher animals are able 

 to proceed a long way in the formation and definition of 

 highly complex constructs, analogous to but probably differ- 

 ing somewhat from those which we form ourselves. These 



