J.— PSYCHOLOGY 173 



summarise the present formulations of experimental findings. There 

 are also the organisations said to be created intentionally. Here the 

 * self ' and ' attitudes ' are called in as explanatory concepts, and with them 

 we pass over into a speculative region of tensions and dynamic relations 

 in the brain field , a somewhat misty region i n our present state of knowledge . 



The contemporary representatives of Locke's doctrine of association 

 are, of course, the Behaviourists. According to this school, man is born 

 with certain native responses to definite conditions in his environment : 

 his unconditioned reflexes. He ' learns ' or acquires new responses when 

 an original response is extended to a different situation or when an 

 original situation is made to evoke a different response. This acquirement 

 is the result of ' conditioning.' All conditioning depends upon the tem- 

 poral arrangement of the factors in the stimulating situation and upon 

 the structure of the animal's nervous system. Conditioning is a scientific 

 formulation of the facts noticed by Locke as association. ' Custom 

 settles habits of thinking in the understanding, as well as of determining 

 in the will, and of motions in the body : all which seems to be but trains 

 of motions in the animal spirits, which, once set agoing, continue in the 

 same steps they have been used to ; which, by often treading, are worn 

 into a smooth path, and the motion in it becomes easy, and as it were 

 natural . . . and are therefore called so, though at first they had no other 

 original but the accidental connection of two ideas, which either the strength 

 of the first impression, or future indulgence so united, that they always 

 kept company together in that man's mind as if they were but one idea ' 

 (Essay, II, xxxiii, § 6 and 7). In the language of Behaviourism such a 

 man is ' conditioned ' to respond to the second idea as he originally did 

 to the first. As in Associationism the complex phenomena of mind were 

 constructed from the simple ones by association, so in Behaviourism all 

 the complex phenomena of human behaviour are constructed from the 

 simple units of reflex responses by conditioning. To quote from a 

 recent article by Pavlov : ' The theory of reflexes divides this general 

 activity of the organism into separate activities, connecting them with 

 internal as well as external influences, and then unites them anew, one 

 to another, which brings us to a more and more clear understanding of the 

 total activity of the organism, as well as of the interaction of the organism 

 with surrounding conditions.'^ Thus might James Mill have described 

 the aim of his Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind. Behaviour- 

 ism presents us with a tidy system wherein everything hangs together. 

 The whole of man's thought (speech) and conduct is theoretically capable 

 of being explained deductively from his original reflexes subject to 

 conditioning. 



There are other contemporary schools wherein association figures as a 

 great principle of linkage, but in each of them some condition over and 

 above bare sequence is recognised. In the psychology of Prof. McDougall 

 association by bare contiguity has a place, but he also lays great stress on 

 the learning that implies a thread of purposive interest. The ' a," b ' and 

 ' c ' that are associated together are members of what Prof. Stout terms a 

 ' conative unity.' This interest would be an essential feature in the 



^^Psy. Review, 1932, p. 103. 



