Experimental Study of Associative Processes 153 



CONCLUSION 



I do not think it is advisable here, at the close of this 

 paper, to give a summary of its results. The paper itself 

 is really only such a summary with the most important evi- 

 dence, for the extent of territory covered and the need of 

 brevity have prevented completeness in explanation or il- 

 lustration. If the reader cares here, at the end, to have the 

 broadest possible statement of our conclusions and will take 

 the pains to supply the right meaning, we might say that 

 our work has described a method, crude but promising, and 

 has made the beginning of an exact estimate of just what 

 associations, simple and compound, an animal can form, 

 how quickly he forms them, and how long he retains them. 

 It has described the method of formation, and, on the con- 

 dition that our subjects were representative, has rejected 

 reason, comparison or inference, perception of similarity, 

 and imitation. It has denied the existence in animal con- 

 sciousness of any important stock of free ideas or impulses, 

 and so has denied that animal association is homologous 

 with the association of human psychology. It has homolo- 

 gized it with a certain limited form of human association. It 

 has proposed, as necessary steps in the evolution of human 

 faculty, a vast increase in the number of associations, signs 

 of which appear in the primates, and a freeing of the ele- 

 ments thereof into independent existence. It has given us 

 an increased insight into various mental processes. It has 

 convinced the writer, if not the reader, that the old specula- 

 tions about what an animal could do, what it thought, 

 and how what it thought grew into what human beings 

 think, were a long way from the truth, and not on the road 

 to it. 



Finally, I wish to say that, although the changes proposed 



