Psychic Integration 235 



legitimate and useful as an aid to interpreting the phenom- 

 ena of reflex nerve action, has no actual existence in nature. 

 It, like the "psychical element," is an abstraction. This is 

 only another way of saying that psychical elements are 

 what they are because they are parts of the mind as a whole, 

 just as we have seen over and over again physical elements 

 of the body are what they are because they are parts of the 

 body. "The specific character of a given psychical process 

 depends for the most part not on the nature of its elements 

 so much as on their union into a composite psychical com- 

 pound. Thus, the idea of an extended body or a rhythm, are 

 all specific forms of psychical experience. But their charac- 

 ter as such is as little determined by their sensational and af- 

 fective elements as are the chemical properties of a compound 

 body by the properties of its chemical elements. Specific char- 

 acter and elementary nature of psychical processes are, ac- 

 cordingly, two entirely different concepts." 



We must not miss an essential point in this, that since 

 with psychical elements just as with chemical elements we 

 never know exactly what or how much each particular ele- 

 ment contributes to the compound, we are obliged to con- 

 ceive the attributes of the compounds as pertaining to the 

 elements collectively even before the compounding has been 

 done. 



So it comes about that because all contents of conscious- 

 ness are fundamentally composite, but are also resolvable into 

 components of various grades of complexity, synthesis and 

 analysis have a prominent place in the Wundtian system. 

 Of these, synthesis is the more definitive and fundamental, 

 since it enters into the very nature of consciousness itself. 

 Consciousness is, according to Wundt, the :< inter-connec- 

 tion of psychical compounds." "It is the name for the gen- 

 eral synthesis of psychical processes, in which synthesis the 

 single compounds are marked off as more intimate combina- 

 tions." 18 The meaning of this is made clearer by the state- 



