PROBLEMS OF GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY 651 



sciousness has ever maintained anything so extravagant. Sub- 

 consciousness implies what Leibnitz called involution, or the exist- 

 ence of what, taking a hint from Herbart, I have ventured to call 

 the ideational tissue, or continuum. Though the explicit revival of 

 what is retained is successional, recurs, so to say, in single file, yet 

 a whole scheme, in which a thousand ideas are involved, may rise 

 towards the threshold together; and, conversely, in the case, say, 

 of a play which we have followed throughout, there is a like involu- 

 tion when at the end we express our opinion of it. It is a mistake, 

 then, to suppose that all the impressions that have successively 

 occupied our attention persist item for item in that multum in parvo 

 apparatus which with due reserve we may call our ideational 

 mechanism. But of their subconscious persistence as thus assimi- 

 lated and elaborated there is, I think, abundant evidence. If such 

 subconscious continuity be denied, we can accord to voluntary 

 attention no more initiative in the revival and grouping of ideas 

 than belonged to non-voluntary attention in the reception of the 

 original impressions: the immediate determinants of both alike 

 would be physical stimuli. And apparently to judge by their 

 terminology some psychologists believe this to be the case. 



This whole topic of the growth and development of reminiscence 

 and ideation has been too much neglected, largely in consequence 

 of the spurious simplicity of the atomistic psychology; particularly 

 its crude doctrine that ideas are mere copies or traces of impressions, 

 its adoption of a physiological hypothesis, now seriously discredited, 

 viz., that the seat of ideas is the same as the seat of sensations, and 

 its failure adequately to distinguish between assimilation and asso- 

 ciation, or to recognize the wide difference that exists between the 

 processes which it describes as association through contiguity and 

 association through similarity. We owe much, I think, in the treat- 

 ment of this topic to Professor Hoffding's article, Ueber Wieder- 

 kennen, Association und psychische Aktivitdt, especially to his dis- 

 tinction of "tied" and "free" ideas, a distinction, however, which I 

 find Drobisch had previously drawn. I regret that there is no time 

 left for further remarks on this problem. 



Among other problems particularly deserving of consideration, 

 I should like at least to mention the genesis of spatial and temporal 

 perception; the whole psychology of language, analytic and genetic; 

 psychical analysis, objects of a higher order, the so-called Gestalt- 

 qualitaten, in a word, the psychology of intellection generally. All of 

 these, including the topic of ideation previously mentioned, lead up 

 to what might be termed epistemological psychology, the psycho- 

 logy, that is, of universal experience on its individualistic side. 

 Perhaps other members of this Congress may see fit to broach one 

 or other of these problems. But I confess that those on which I have 



