648 GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY 



talk of things; nay, ideas are then but offprints or copies of things. 

 Locke's "simple ideas," for example, are pretty much of this sort: 

 as simple and single they come, and as such they are retained, save 

 as they may be afterwards variously compounded and related. 

 True, for Locke such, compounding and relating was "the work 

 of the mind," the result, that is to say, of subjective interest and 

 initiative. But soon the inevitable further step was taken: the 

 "compounding and relating" of these isolated and independent 

 elements was transferred by Hume to certain "natural" processes, 

 and then connected by Hartley with brain vibratiuncles ; and thus 

 the supremacy of psychological atomism was assured for a cen- 

 tury or more. But it is the first step that costs, as the French say, 

 and that is what we have to challenge. The disorderly, unrelated 

 aggregate of simple sensations is a pure chimera, an Unding. If 

 genetic and comparative psychology prove anything, they prove 

 this. The earliest phases of experience are as little chaotic and 

 fragmentary as are the earliest forms of life. In the so-called "con- 

 tents of consciousness " at any moment, the psychologist may dis- 

 tinguish between field and focus, what is perceived and what is 

 apperceived, and may allow that, as we descend in the scale of 

 life, this distinction is less pronounced or even disappears alto- 

 gether; but discontinuity he never reaches, either in the objective 

 or in the subjective factor of experience. And when similar situ- 

 ations recur, the new is not ranged beside the old like beads on a 

 thread, but the one is assimilated and the other further differen- 

 tiated; and so there results a growing familiarity and facility, as- 

 long as such situations awaken interest at all. Presentations, in 

 short, have none of the essential characteristics of atoms, they 

 may come to signify things, but never to be them, and the grow- 

 ing complexity of psychical life is only parodied by treating it as 

 mental chemistry. 



How, then, it may reasonably be asked, do I propose to account 

 for the long predominance of associationism and for the recent 

 revival of psychological atomism in a modified form? For instance, 

 it has been said that the so-called "laws" of association are for psy- 

 chology what the law of gravitation is for physics; surely they must 

 be of substantial importance to make so extravagant a claim even 

 possible? Yes; as I have allowed, they deal with nine tenths of the 

 facts. A man at forty is a bundle of habits, we say; and a bee seems 

 to be such a bundle from the first. Again, the poet exhorts us to 

 rise on stepping-stones of our dead selves to higher things. Now it 

 is solely in the wide region of already fixed, already organized ex- 

 perience that associationism finds its province. It can deal with so 

 much of experience as is already grown, formed, and so far, in a 

 sense, dead; with what has become reflex, "secondarily automatic," 



