144 MIND IN EVOLUTION CHAP. 



eyes, and the flame as a cruel burning heat, scorching its 

 little hand. If so, it has formed a judgment, which, when 

 it can speak, it will express in the proposition " fire 

 burns," and an idea of fire as one thing with different 

 attributes. Its experience is a whole containing elements 

 which remain distinct. Both as such a whole, and as being 

 concerned with a particular object, we may call it a concrete 

 experience. Equally concrete is the idea or judgment 

 founded thereon. But if the child is incapable of so much 

 thought, it may still reach the same practical result by that 

 more direct method by which the fire from being an attrac- 

 tive becomes a repellent object. In the one case, two terms 

 are grasped in their relation. In the other, one term only 

 is present, but it has for practical purposes borrowed the 

 character of the other to which it stood related in past 

 experience. 1 In the first case, there is judgment : in the 

 second, assimilation. 



b. The Association of Ideas. 



Assimilation, we have seen, does not necessarily involve 

 ideas at all. A perception which has " assimilated " the 

 motor character of some experience to which it is related, 

 has the power of shaping behaviour as though with a view 

 to the repetition of that experience, yet no idea of the 

 purpose of the adaptation comes before consciousness. In 



1 In ordinary phraseology the relation A B, explicit in the one case, 

 acts implicitly in the other. It may be asked how we can distinguish 

 the two, when we are judging, not by our own consciousness, but by 

 inference from behaviour. A relation is explicit in consciousness if its 

 terms are united and yet distinct. It is implicit if it merely influences 

 consciousness, so as, for example, to affect the way in which one of its 

 terms is apprehended. Generalising this we may say that in conscious- 

 ness the explicit is present on its own account, while the implicit is that 

 which is present merely as qualifying or influencing something else. 

 Extending the distinction to cases where we can judge only by behaviour, 

 we may say that an element of experience is explicitly grasped by the 

 mind if a distinct function in the guidance of behaviour can be assigned 

 to it. It acts implicitly if, without having any distinctive effect of its own, 

 it is yet a necessary part of some experience which has a function as a 

 whole. Thus, in the case of assimilation, the experience A B operates 

 as a whole, and its elements have an effect only as contributing to this 

 operation. In concrete experience, on the other hand, the relation A B 

 has, for example, a distinct function from that of the term A, for the 

 reaction to A will differ according as B is or is not expected to follow. In 

 conceptual thought, again, the relation uniting A and B acquires a 

 function distinct from that of A and B themselves, since it may go to 

 build up concepts with which A and B having nothing to do. 



