Psychic Integration 



equally important. Thus Pillsbury : "It was a neglect of 

 the subjective conditions and the insistence upon the objec- 

 tive side of the problem that has led the English Associa- 

 tional School into disrepute. The explanations that they 

 gave were true as far as they went, but their incompleteness 

 vitiated the conclusions as soon as they laid claim to uni- 

 versality." And the author then shows, convincingly 

 enough, how two sets of subjective factors, attention and 

 choice, play a large and important role in determining the 

 "associative train." And further, "A complete explanation 

 of association demands that both sets of factors [objective 

 and subjective] be taken into account; to omit either is to 

 fail in the solution of the problem." 



Preliminary Examination of Objective and Subjective 



There is undoubtedly a real gain in having proved, as 

 Pillsbury and others surely have, that a "side" other than 

 the objective in association does exist. It is highly ad- 

 vantageous, also, to have learned enough about this other 

 "side" to make the term subjective an appropriate name 

 for it. But any one coming to a study of the associational 

 activities of the organism's psychic life as we have, namely 

 as naturalists, can not avoid, if true to his traditions and 

 methods, wanting to know how these two "sides," the objec- 

 tive and the subjective, go together what the nature is of 

 their relation. For the very fact that they are two sides 

 of one thing is to the naturalist prima facie evidence that 

 they are in vital organic connection. Even the two sides of 

 an inanimate thing, like the earth with its two hemispheres, 

 have a relation to each other too important for the earth 

 sciences to ignore or even to put off as merely "parallel." 

 But when it comes to an entity like a live animal, the quin- 

 tessence of which is organization, the question of how two 

 of its "sides" so important as its objective and its subjec- 



