Psychic Integration 



on the deeper meaning of external nature, were produced. 

 Again the old story with which we have become familiar: not 

 the organism, but elements of, or perhaps merely in it, are 

 the causal explanation of whatever occurrences are associ- 

 ated with the organism. It is, I think, safe to assume that 

 both the merits and the demerits of associationist psychol- 

 ogy have been made patent enough, at least to English- 

 speaking students, by the writings of James and others. 



If only the doctrine of "association of ideas" can be satis- 

 fied to do what it is really able to do, and not insist upon 

 trying to do what it can not do, its usefulness is great and 

 its permanence in psychology assured. 



As indicated above, the "huge error," as James expresses 

 it, by which the "whole historic doctrine of psychological 

 association is tainted" ' is only another miscarriage of the 

 elementalist mode of reasoning, and so is subject to the 

 general type of criticism which the reader has met in every 

 chapter in this book. 



In order to divest the criticism as much as possible of 

 personal flavor I shall make large use of James' language. 

 "All these writers," says James, referring to Hobbes, Hume, 

 Priestley, Hodgson and the later English associationists, 

 "hold more or less explicitly to the notion of atomistic 'ideas' 

 which occur. In Germany, the same mythological suppo- 

 sition has been more radically grasped, and carried out to 

 a still more logical, if more repulsive, extreme, by Herbart 

 and his followers, who until recently may be said to have 

 reigned supreme in their native country." 



Now the objection to the doctrine of "atomistic ideas" 

 does not so much concern the conception of ideas as atoms 

 as the nature attributed to these atoms, namely in assum- 

 ing them to be immutable, and sufficient in their isolate 

 capacities to account for the thought and other products 

 arising from their "association." The following two quota- 

 tions illustrate the form this criticism, the essence of which 



