168 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



light upon the situation. The ultimate factor that has to be considered 

 is something that is purposive — a general striving — which factor has to 

 be assumed in order that the theory of conditioned reflexes will work. 



Unity of mind, then, is something which develops. In its general 

 form it is there from the beginning, but it only exists in relation to a 

 multiplicity. There is a one-and-many relationship from the beginning. 

 Moreover, the individual himself is, to some extent, an abstraction. He 

 belongs to a species. He has a history, and his history is, in part, the 

 history of the entire species. The history of the species is part of the 

 history of organic evolution, and the history of organic evolution is part 

 of the history of the Universe — if, indeed, we may think of the Universe 

 itself as having a history. But within the individual experience there are 

 partial activities that may struggle with one another just as individual 

 members of a species may compete with one another, and in this nisus or 

 striving towards more complete unity and greater complexity and more 

 adequate adaptation to environment, the process of dissociation shows 

 itself as essential and normal. Right from the beginning we must realise 

 that dissociation is just as normal and necessary as association. The 

 mind as it grows must be able to reject, and also must be able to segregate 

 one activity from another. Different activities must be insulated from 

 one another to a great extent within the organism, just as in an electrical 

 machine there must be insulation of the wires. This insulation is what 

 is meant by normal dissociation or disjunction. And from the patho- 

 logical point of view there can be disturbance in both respects — 

 disturbance of association and disturbance of dissociation. Experiences 

 may become associated in such a way as to blur the clearness of vision 

 of the individual as regards appearances and values, just as, more obviously, 

 dissociation may go beyond its proper function and tend to destroy the 

 unity or totality towards which normal striving is directed. 



The earlier associationist doctrine of psychology was unsatisfactory 

 because, among other things, it failed to distinguish between the process 

 of experiencing, or the act of experiencing, and the content or object of 

 experience ; and its aim seems to have been to describe the mind as a sort 

 of mosaic of contents of experience joined up to one another according to 

 the laws of association by contiguity and similarity. But association is 

 primarily between the acts of experience. These acts of experience are 

 differentiations of the fundamental striving — that which Spinoza called 

 the conaUis in suo esse perseverare, ' the striving to persist in one's own 

 being.' This striving has an object. There is always an object — the 

 environmental changes which the individual has to face — and corre- 

 sponding with the complexity of the environment there is a complexity 

 developing within this general striving, forming a complex system of 

 conations. This conation involves the two other well-known aspects of. 

 cognition or awareness, and of feeling-tone. Associationist psychology 

 erred in failing to allow due weight to the conative side, and in attempting 

 to range the different kinds of feeling on a level with the different kinds 

 of objective experience. But even according to the associationist scheme, 

 dissociation or disjunction was necessary for a complete explanation of 

 normal mental activity. Side by side with the principles of association 

 by contiguity and similarity, there was the principle of dissociation by 



