160 PSYCHOLOGY. 



Where the elemental units are supposed to be feelings, 

 the case is in no wise altered. Take a hundred of tliem, 

 shuffle them and pack them as close together as you can 

 (whatever that may mean) ; still each remains the same feel- 

 ing it always was, shut in its own skin, windowless, igno- 

 rant of what the other feelings are and mean. There would 

 be a hundred-and-first feeling there, if, when a group or 

 series of such feelings were set up, a consciousness belong- 

 ing to the group as such should emerge. And this 101st feel- 

 ing would be a totally new fact ; the 100 original feelings 

 might, by a curious physical law, be a signal for its creation, 

 when they came together; but they would have no sub- 

 stantial identity with it, nor it with them, and one could 

 never deduce the one from the others, or (in any intelligible 

 sense) say that they evolved it. 



Take a sentence of a dozen words, and take twelve men 

 and tell to each one word. Then stand the men in a row or 

 jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as 

 intently as he will; nowhere will there be a consciousness 

 of the whole sentence.* We talk of the 'spirit of the age,* 

 and the 'sentiment of the peoj)le,' and in various waj-s we 

 hypostatize 'public opinion.' But we know this to be sym- 

 bolic speech, and never dream that the spirit, opinion, 

 sentiment, etc., constitute a consciousness other than, and 

 additional to, that of the several individuals whom the 

 words 'age,' 'people,' or 'public' denote. The private 

 minds do not agglomerate into a higher compound mind. 

 This has always been the invincible contention of the 

 spiritualists against the associationists in Psychology, — a 

 contention which we shall take up at greater length in 

 Chapter X. The associationists say the mind is constituted 



* " Someoue might say that although it is true that neither a blind 

 man nor a tieaf man by himself can compare sounds with colors, yet 

 since one hears and the other sees they might do so both together. . . . 

 But whether they are apart or close together makes no difference; not even 

 if they permanently keep house together , no, not if they were Siamese 

 twins, or more than Siamese twins, and were inseparably grown together, 

 would it make the assumption any more possible. Only when sound and 

 color are represented in the same reality is it thinkable that they should 

 be compared." (Brentano: Psychologic, p. 209.) 



