Y72 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



psychology is dead, how far may it nevertheless be true that Gestalt is 

 fighting a present-day attitude of mind which had its historical foundation 

 in Locke's confusion of logical analysis and an inquiry into psychological 

 genesis ? 



Gestalt psychology would claim that no constructive explanation can 

 be satisfactory which sets out from such elements as sensory events or 

 reflex responses, and attempts to build up the experienced phenomena of 

 human awareness and behaviour by the synthetic method. Perceptual 

 awareness of a situation and responsive behaviour must on their view be 

 taken in toto. The explanation of why just ' this ' is perceived rather 

 than ' that ' must be sought in the physical constitution of the immediate 

 environment and in the total condition of the organism. The school 

 sets itself the task of studying the conditions in the stimulating situation 

 which determine the perception of this pattern rather than that. It is 

 always the pattern or configuration as a whole which has to be explained. 

 Much experimental work has been done and valuable information ob- 

 tained, particularly in the field of visual perception. 



Whereas for the ' orthodox ' school — if there is still a school capable of 

 claiming this adjective — ' meaning ' in the form of memory images, actual 

 or potential, comes in as an ingredient in the complex perception of an x, 

 for Gestalt meaning may lie in the nature of the sensory pattern or total 

 organisation. To take an example, size or shape perceived in indirect 

 vision is not ' apparent ' size or shape modified by the memory of * real * 

 size and shape ; the size or shape actually perceived is due to the sensory 

 pattern of the whole field. 



Leaving aside such characters of perceived objects as form, size, colour, 

 brightness, and considering the characters derived from past experience 

 of effects upon the percipient, a wider interpretation of ' meaning ' is 

 required. For example, ' these red berries ' are recognised as poisonous. 

 ' Poisonous ' is not due to the sensory pattern in the sense in which the 

 particular shade of red is. Intra-organic conditions are stressed in such 

 a case. We have a theory of memory traces. ' Traces of past experiences 

 are neither an indifferent continuum nor a mosaic of independent points ; 

 rather they must be pictures of past organisation.' ^ We must presume 

 that the behaviour response wherein lay the gist of being noxious is part 

 of the berry organisation. It is ' organisation ' which for Gestalt replaces 

 the conception of association. The so-called association of contiguity is 

 never mere collocation in time or space. It is always an instance of 

 organisation. ' Organisation is not at all an aggregation of indifferent 

 material. ... If association is a consequence of organisation, it must 

 also depend upon the mutually relative properties of what is or shall be 

 organisated.' ^ 



When we turn to the question, How do organisations arise ? we may 

 not be wholly satisfied with the answers at present forthcoming. There 

 are the sensory organisations or patterns the conditions of which are being 

 experimentally investigated. Here the relative importance of the en- 

 vironmental and the intra-organic factors stands in need of elucidation. 

 Descriptive terms such as ' closure,' ' nearness,' ' pregnancy,' ' symmetry ' 

 1 Kohler, Gestalt Psychology, p. 211. ^ Ibid. p. 226. 



