236 The Unity of the Organism 



ment that unconscious states like deep sleep, faint, and so 

 on, are the interruption of these interconnections. 



Remarks On Analysis and Synthesis 



This brings us to where we can see the important distinc- 

 tion between an aggregation and a synthesis — in a psychical 

 sense particularly — and hkewise between a fragmentation 

 and an analysis. No mere aggregation,* as of ideas or emo- 

 tions, would make consciousness. Only a synthesis of con- 

 stituents can do that. And, contrariwise, while the mere 

 severance of the synthesized components produces uncon- 

 sciousness, an analysis of them results, not in unconscious- 

 ness, but in a consciousness of the constituent parts of the 

 contents of consciousness. The essence of consciousness is 

 unitariness — integratcdness, in our general terminology — as 

 regards the contents of an individual organism's psychical 

 nature, so that whatever analytical processes the mind per- 

 forms must move within the bounds of its own unitariness 

 or integratcdness. Were we to conceive the analytic opera- 

 tions of the mind to exceed or even quite to equal its synthetic 

 operations, we should have to conceive it as utterly negating 

 consciousness, i.e., as destroying itself. A man could ana- 

 lyze his own mind in an elementalist sense only by suiciding. 

 In other words, he could never do it, simply because he 

 would have killed himself by the very process of analyzing 

 before he had completed his job. 



These remarks on the distinction between synthesis and 

 aggregation, and between analysis and fragmentation, are 

 not quite what Wundt sa^^s. They go somewhat beyond his 

 actual expression, but are legitimate inferences, I am quite 

 sure, from his discussion as a whole. And they help us toward 

 what we want to accomplish, namely to discover still more 



* Recall our previous remarks on this subject, e.g., pp. 183 and 268, 

 and also the quotation from Hartley, p. 228. 



