72 



"Presentations are associated by contiguity," he claims, "be- 

 cause they unite in a single motor discharge; by similarity, 

 because both of them, through their association with a third, 

 have come to unite in a common discharge." 



It will be evident, then, that we have fundamentally one 

 standpoint in the earlier Association School, and in Spencer, 

 Romanes, Lloyd Morgan, and Baldwin. The tendency, how- 

 ever, to derive psychological from physical and physiological 

 processes has not been so explicit among later writers as 

 among the earlier, many of the later writers (for example, 

 Lloyd Morgan) insisting on the recognition of physiological 

 and psychological processes as belonging to distinct orders of 

 being. 



Reverting now to Spencer, the question may be asked, 

 Are "the established laws of association" 1 as understood by 

 the Association School, established as Spencer maintains? 

 These laws have been variously stated, but their fundamental 

 meaning has been set forth in the exposition given above. 

 That is to say, the ' laws ' of contiguity and similarity govern 

 the order of revival among ideas (i.e. the order of association) 

 by means of the physiological functioning of the organism. 

 The association of ideas, on this showing, is an order in con- 

 sciousness determined by physical and physiological processes 

 extraneous to consciousness. In other words, the process is 

 the result of the mechanics of matter and motion. 



Such a position, however, it will be found exceedingly dif- 

 ficult to maintain. It has been seen that the above writers, 

 more particularly since Spencer's time, have gone to consider- 

 able trouble in giving a detailed analysis of physiological pro- 

 cesses upon which to base their psychology; maintaining at 

 the same time, in the words of Lloyd Morgan, that "even if 

 the two are mentioned in a breath, the physiological and the 

 psychological belong to distinct orders of being. " 



Now, if we grant such a standpoint, is there any justifi- 

 cation for drawing the conclusion which these men have drawn ? 

 that is,, that a psychical process must occur in a certain order 

 because of a supposed particular order of physiological func- 

 tioning. It is claimed that vibrations take place in the gray 

 matter of the brain, and in the nervous system along certain 

 regular routes, and that these are necessarily the basis for 

 certain regular processes of thought. Ideas follow in memory 

 the order in which the original physiological processes oc- 

 curred, because it is supposed that the order of their acquisition 



.C. 250. 



