174 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



experience acquired in working out any instinctive tendency. Member- 

 ship of a purposive whole is in principle a radical departure from associa- 

 tion by temporal contiguity. 



In psycho-analysis there is again great emphasis on association and its 

 opposite, dissociation. The old forms of association, contiguity and 

 similarity, are retained and much use is made of them in explaining trans- 

 ference, trains of ideas, complexes, but the operation of association links 

 appears to be completely controlled by instinctive and emotional disposi- 

 tions. The machinery of association is the same as in the older doctrines, 

 but the levers are operated by forces which lie quite outside the ken of 

 association psychology. 



Association figures also in the motor- theory of consciousness, and 

 here it would seem to be more after the old pattern. All association is 

 between movement systems. Contiguity and similarity must be inter- 

 preted as contiguity and similarity between the systems of incipient and 

 overt movements involved in the associated ideas. 



We have' said that Locke left his afterthought, his union of ideas by 

 association, unreconciled with, or unrelated to, his account of knowing. 

 Knowledge is the perception of the connection of and agreement, or 

 disagreement and repugnancy, of any of our ideas. In Book IV he gives 

 us a classification of the kinds of connections and repugnancies we thus 

 perceive : identity, relation, co-existence or necessary connection, real 

 existence. It would be out of place to go into the details of each class. 

 What is at once apparent is that in all varieties of knowing the knower is 

 perceiving some kind of relation between his ideas. They are synthesised 

 or united in virtue of a perceived agreement or repugnancy. 



If we turn to contemporary psychology we may compare this doctrine 

 with the principles of cognition laid down by Prof. Spearman. Prof. 

 Spearman calls his qualitative principles of cognition ' noegenetic' He 

 claims that they and they alone are generative of new items in the 

 field of cognition. FamiHar as these principles may be, I will venture to 

 quote the second and the third. The second is the principle of the 

 eduction of relations : ' The mentally presenting of any two or more 

 characters (simple or complex) tends to evoke immediately a knowing of 

 relation between them.' The third is the principle of the eduction of 

 correlates : ' The presenting of any character together with any relation 

 tends to evoke immediately a knowing of the correlate character.' These 

 two principles make the knowing of relations the basic fact of cognition. 

 They are the key to intelligence. Prof. Spearman would agree with 

 Gestalt psychologists in stressing organisation. He diflFers from them by 

 regarding organisation as dependent upon perceiving characters as related. 

 All organisation or synthesis depends ultimately upon cognised relations. 

 He thus denies sensory organisations as simple data. By his second 

 principle he necessarily repudiates association in the Lockian sense. 

 Although he keeps the names of the old laws of association, contiguity 

 and similarity, he states explicitly that ' quasi-mechanical reproductive 

 adherence has its source in the noetic coherence.'* In principle repro- 

 duction by association and the eduction of correlates are akin. The 



* Nature of Intelligence, p. 146. 



