234 



The Unity of the Organism 



ness a force very closely related to will, that in and of itself 

 chooses certain ideas for elevation to the high places of 

 consciousness, and equally arbitrarily rejects others." And 

 then follows this in Pill8bur3^'s criticism, which brings out 

 unmistakably its real purport : "It is very much like the 

 self-conscious unity of apperception of Kant, which gives 

 the final form and order to the various disconnected elements 

 of the mind, and is in so far something inexplicable, a factor 

 in experience that must be assumed without any further 

 discussion of its nature, origin, or laws of action." ^^ A 

 suspicion, obviously, that the transcendentalism of Kant 

 broods over Wundt's theor}'. As to tlie justification of this 

 suspicion we need not be concerned here. Enough for 

 us at this point to recognize that from the standpoint of 

 description as natural history practices the art, or aims to 

 practice it, Wundt's account of the way the mind works in 

 a vast range of its activities seems true, and as far as it 

 goes is satisfactory. 



Not only the matter of clearness of the contents of con- 

 sciousness, but their makeup as well is important. Al- 

 though "psychical elements" figure largely in Wundt's sys- 

 tem, one finds no intimation that the whole mind and its 

 contents can be "explained" by reducing them to "ultimate 

 elements" after the familiar manner of elementalist explana- 

 tion. "All the contents of psychical experience," Wundt 

 says, "are of a composite character." And it follows from 

 this that ''psychical elements, or the absolutely simple and 

 irreducible components of psychical phenomena, are the 

 products of analysis and abstraction." ^^ 



The two words, "analysis" and "abstraction," need par- 

 ticular consideration. The psychical elements found by 

 analysis do not exist, as such, in nature. Analysis, in this 

 case, is logical or thought-analysis, and not objective analy- 

 sis. We should do well to recall what was said in the dis- 

 cussion of reflexes, namely that the "simple reflex," though 



